The purpose of this blog is to compile together my writings from all over the internet into one self-hosted blog.
Any posts dated before this one are therefore of a spurious antiquity, since the very beginning of this blog was yesterday, the 26th September 2022.
Also because of this, this post has been pinned to the top and will remain open for comments.
i say something like “oh it’s fucked up but you should read it. it’s like an anime where all the characters are the worst aristocrats you ever heard of in a world made up of like Alpha Centauri factions where Programmed to Kill and Left Behind and the whole Epstein parapolitics thing happens and Charles Manson is the narrator and the whole thing has a very ‘everyone lives in a Seventies utopia cult’ vibe. I don’t think the books are good exactly but you should read them” which I think covers it
天地不仁, 以萬物為芻狗.
聖人不仁, 以百姓為芻狗.
天地之間, 其猶橐籥乎.
虛而不屈.
動而愈出.
多言數窮.
不如守中
Heaven and Earth have no 仁;
They regard all things as straw-dogs.
The sage has no 仁;
He regards the people as straw-dogs.
Between Heaven and Earth, it is like a bellows or a flute!
Empty, but not exhausted;
With movement, more comes out.
Too much talk always exhausts;
It is better to keep to the inside.“
Selah.
The lesson this morning is taken from the familiar fifth chapter from the Daodejing, the Yi Wu translation, and my key is this paper by Gang Xu.
仁 is the central virtue for Confucians, as it is for the mandarins of our own celestial kingdom.
The usual translation for 仁 is “humanity”, “benevolence” or even “Good”.
The concept is sometimes translated “empathy” and here we see a link to the central professional virtue of our own time and place.
This central virtue is more and more being called “kindness”, and from this view, the text from laoze appears paradoxical or abhorrent.
Gang Xu illustrates what he considers a primordial understanding of 仁 as being akin to bushido – a moral practice of self-sacrifice for the moral order where noblemen kill themselves out of honour and offers several examples:
The first is from Confucius himself, where he criticises a king lacking in 仁: the king had attempted to conquer the world, failed, and retreated to his bunker in shame. The king failed to 克 himself, leading to disaster. The conventional translation of 克 is “subdue” or “conquer” and so Confucius’ judgment is that the fault of the king was his failure. Gang Xu believes the root meaning of 克 is “kill” and so Confucius is, at least on one level, saying that the fault of the king was that he did not kill himself and take the noble death.
He multiplies examples, and posits this understanding of moral suicide as being the basic and ancient concept of 仁, on which he builds his bureaucratic moral framework. This is similar to how a 君子 is transformed from a “verray parfit gentil knyght” to a consummate civil servant.
With this key, an interpretation of the fifth chapter of the Daodejing is opened. Laucius is criticising not only the orthodox Confucian view of 天地人, but drawing on this primordial meaning.
He says that 天地 do indeed treat the world as a sacrifice, but not like a puffed-up, narcissistic nobleman performing a “deep” act of 仁. Instead the sacrifice is like that of straw dogs – lightly generated for the occasion, and a clear show of shallow appearances.
The proto-Confucian warrior is performing his “deep” act fundamentally for his own shallow ego, and there is a mismatch in depth.
The Daoist sage, contrarily, reflects that what lies “between 天 and 地”, produced by them, is really even more shallow than a straw dog – it is a puff of air, a noise, a whirling of wind.
Cosmologically, what lies “between 天 and 地” is 人. Laucius goes beyond calling the people “straw dogs” and calls them an inexhaustible wind. He also practices what he preaches metatextually, and takes care not to call the people 仁 by not even calling them the homophonous 人.
The Confucian attitude towards 人 of 言ing them through philosophical discourse, bureaucracy and government edicts is causing an exhaustion of the inexhaustible – a great human sacrifice, and so all 人 is being destroyed by the Confucian universalisation of the destructive principle of 仁.
The application of this to our own times, and the urging of “kindness” by the mandarins of our own celestial kingdom on those called to serve, I leave to your own contemplation.
early church people make a big thing about the judaising controversy, especially the penis part, and make these remarks about how “circumcision would get you nowhere, simply on a practical level!” but then like 500 years later along comes mr mohammed and says oh yeah u gotta clip off that hood and, sure, this is fine among the arabs and maybe the egyptians too, if they were still keeping that up from pharaoh times, but then Islam quickly spreads into Persia, a land of hooded heroes and there’s no problem there, then it keeps going into India, same deal, and all the way to Indonesia, and it doesn’t seem to be a deal, and it goes fine into the Maghreb and I presume Andalusia, and so on.
I think the foreskins of Europe owe more to Paul’s personal neuroses than any basic reticence on the part of the Romans.
The most interesting instance, and the one most touted by ideologists, is the rising at Pergamon led by Aristonicus, in 132.⁸⁹ Aristonicus aimed at creating a new “City of the Sun”; he was joined in this endeavor by the Stoic philosopher Blossius of Cumae, who had been tried for high treason after the death of his friend Tiberius Gracchus, but, luckily, acquitted. Now perhaps about 250 or 225 (the exact date remains uncertain) one Iambulus had written a utopian novel about an island on the equator, in the Indian Ocean, inhabited by sun worshippers: a communal paradise of tall sages with hairless skin and flexible bones, who lived in kinship groups of about four hundred persons, shared all property (women and children included: there was no marriage), and voluntarily committed suicide, by lying down on a lethally soporific plant, at the age of 150, or sooner if crippled or diseased.⁹⁰ It has been argued that Aristonicus, with Blossius’s advice, was trying to establish this odd Heliopolis on earth.⁹¹ Now it is quite possible that Aristonicus knew Iambulus’s fable, even that he borrowed the idea of Sun Citizens (Hēliopolitai) from it.⁹² But at the same time we should take heed of Finley’s salutary warning, for a society in which literature was monopolized by the educated (i.e., upper) classes, “against seeking some particular book behind every popular idea or popular action.”⁹³ More important is the fact that Aristonicus was an illegitimate aspirant to the throne of Pergamon, and furious because Attalus III had, the year before, bequeathed his entire kingdom to Rome (cf. below, p. 529). His appeal to the serfs on the great estates, and the uncommitted smallholders of the interior (as opposed to the wealthy, who were only too willing to truck with Rome, and, as usual, took fright at any threat to redistribute wealth or land), sounds far more like personal and nationalist ambition.⁹⁴ That he held out promises of freedom and justice to his supporters is likely enough, and this may well have involved the connection, common in Near Eastern religious thought, between the divine sun and human justice.⁹⁵ But the motivation, again, is hardly ideological.⁹⁶
With the possible exception of Aristonicus, no one, so far as we can tell, ever thought of actually putting these ideas into practice.¹⁰⁴ The one case we hear of is, as we might expect, a private venture on the part of an eccentric, with no revolutionary violence involved, an Epicurean-style withdrawal from society supported by ample private funds. Cassander’s brother Alexarchus is said to have founded a city named Ouranopolis, “The City of Heaven,” on the Athos peninsula: it would be nice to think that the monastic tradition there owed something, even if only indirectly, to his example. We should not attach too much significance to the fact that he took the radiant sun as a symbol on the coins he struck, since the sunburst, though used in Near Eastern sun cults, may also have served, at least since Philip II’s day, as the emblem of the Macedonian Argead dynasty.¹⁰⁵ More interestingly, he was a linguist, who invented a language for his foundation: a specimen preserved by Athenaeus looks like the Greek equivalent of Anthony Burgess’s Nadsat in A Clockwork Orange, foreign loan words oddly compounded.¹⁰⁶ It would be interesting to know if he actually got people to talk that way. But this dotty (and obviously financially secure) contracting-out has more in common with Coleridge’s dream, in 1794, of Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna than with any kind of organic movement to change the fundamental structure of Hellenistic society. The notion of the alternative society, on the other hand, deserves more attention than it has hitherto received: at least it restated the popular urge to reject society as it stood in positive, constructive terms. All it needed—but failed to discover—was its America.— Peter Green, Alexander to Actium
I suspect, but can’t prove, that the relationship of the early Christians, or at least the Pauline Gentile churches, to the Jews was more like that between Theosophists and Indians than people like to think.
…
specifically i mean things like that the jews were a convenient group for psychological projection of the trauma, bullshit d conditioning of the spiritual seekers in Corinth, Thessalonika, etc.
I notice for instance that most of the stuff that they have “Paul” say about the Law is quite baffling psychobabble. When people discuss new religious movements today, a great emphasis is put on what went wrong – why were existing religions not doing it for them? Crowley makes no sense without knowing he was a Plymouth Brethren. A lot of 20th century ones fit into place as being anti-communist, or vehicles for psychedelic drugs.
People very seldom talk about the early Christians like this, and for the good reason that there’s no evidence of what they were like, and only very scanty evidence about proto-Christians. “Paul” babbling about the Law is probably the best source, but I haven’t come to any conclusions yet except that if “Paul”’s epistles are supposed to be the therapy, the symptoms must have been florid as fuck.
…
To make it more implicit, the picture that is coming together in my mind is something like this:
there was a man who was born a gentile, but who was fascinated by new age stuff, especially Judaism, and we may as well call him Mr Little. Mr Little was primarily a fantasist, and in character not unlike my version of Sam Vimes – he boasts of himself that he was a great persecuter of Christians, and was a perfect Jew, a pharisee! of a royal tribe! with a royal name! But I think all of this was mostly in his heart – he loved the Jews as being an Other he could project his new age feelings onto – an ancient people, a proud people, a holy people, a special people, a Right people, and one that Mr Little longed to take for himself. Similarly, when Mr Little talks about how he was a great persecuter, I think he is also talking in his heart.
He has known people, fellow New Agers, who also love the Jewish lifestyle, but are happy being mediocre, admirers from a distance, Hypsistarians, God-Fearers, cultural appropriators. He doesn’t like them, and moves at some point to Jerusalem, where he makes up some story about him being born a Jew, maybe gets his foreskin cut off to pass, Richard Burton style, maybe doesn’t, but tries to act like a Pharisee to show the New Agers what authentic Judaism is like.
But it never takes – the Jews in Jerusalem can see through him and he doesn’t integrate, and he ends up falling into the New Age scene in Jerusalem and bumps up necessarily against the disciples of the risen Jesus.
I think the right sort of comparison here to get a picture of the very early Jerusalem church is somewhere between “an anarchist commune”, “an asylum of local schizos” and “a cult whose leader just got arrested and executed”. It is very easy, among such touchy people, mostly poor young men and women, to get a reputation of being a fascist, a cop, a fed, the worst kind of person, and I think this fate befell Mr Little, and it was a reputation that Mr Little took for himself for two reasons: it was the judgement of Authentic Jews and even being kicked around by such people was a kind of honour to him, because he had found a place among Authentic Jews and he was a freak whose delight was in resentment.
Secondly, because the early church so clearly loved Jesus, and something in the Gospel spoke to Mr Little. I think the first Christians were in the habit of telling tall tales about Jesus, a mixture of truthful stories about things the pre-resurrection Jesus did, Theory bullshit and all sorts of Unverified Personal Gnosis about the things that the invisible risen Jesus was doing in their lives. In this context, Mr Little’s Damascene vision is not so strange, because he was doing exactly the same thing as the apostles, and so why should he not be one?
Mr Little hangs around for a while, as it becomes clear that this band of losers are actually going somewhere, he can stop scene-hopping and recovers his reputation in a professionalising scene (his profession of “tent-maker” in the original Greek is literally a maker of scenes, a “scenester”, which I think invites eisegesis, but what eisegesis!) but is eventually sent off back to Asia Minor to evangelise there.
And the records of what he did there are recorded in the confusing mess of the Epistles, in which he is “all things to all men”, a Jew to the Jews and a Gentile to the Gentiles. The epistles, as confusing as they are, are edited highlights of what I can only imagine must be impressively crazy and manipulative original preaching, lying, exaggerating and people-pleasing. He got enough of a reputation as an important guy that when the New Age scenes in Asia Minor solidified, became Christian, and more evangelists come, his name got attached to other material – not like the authentic Mr Little stuff is so coherent that you can see the join – and his immortality was assured.
another astrology experiment that would have hilarious payoff if even vaguely statistically significant: what if it turns out that people with SAD have, like, a chain of natal malefics all lined up that go into solar opposition transit at regularly the same time of year every year
origin of this is in an argument i had with someone that I didn’t think there was anything in the brain that kept track of the seasons, because the seasons are their own best model so there’s no need for an “astrology lobe” of the brain to keep track of the time of the year unlike the diurnal circadian rhythms, and SAD being treatable with sun lamps was proof of this, since if there was an astrology lobe, the mind would not yield to this fake spring so readily
but… what if… what if there is an astrology lobe…
Imagine Gautama Buddha had something against Tamils. Like seriously, he thought Tamils were everything that was wrong with the world, and Shakyans were good people and some day everyone, but not the Tamils, would realise this. Imagine he span elaborate metaphors about conquering Tamils through mind war, Tamils kept coming up to him and spoiling his meditation, Tamildom was an Unfortunate Rebirth etc.
This Buddhism spread throughout the world, even as far as Ruritania. Nobody in Ruritania knew what a Tamil was, and they enthusiastically believed they were basically some sort of invisible goblin. Ruritanian Buddhism flourished into a rich and meaningful religion, with much discourse about Tamils.
One day, centuries later, Ethnian explorer Joip Fãnzek went travelling and he discovered Nepal, still full of Shakyans. He was delighted to discover Buddhists there and shared some Tamil stories. The people there laughed and said “Oh yes… Tamils. They are rascals and blody basterds but my friend, you know, it has not stopped since. Since the Tamils, things have been terrible. The Yonas were even worse. And the offspring of the Umayyads are a curse unto this day! My own daughter fell in love with one! Remember the Mughals? I shall never forget! And the least said about the Bartanvi the better. Yes, it is a solemn religious commitment for we Buddhists to remember them, for they are all worse than Tamils! I will never visit a Tamil house”.
Joip was a little shaken by this, not least because he didn’t realise Tamils were real. He travelled south a little and found Tamils happily living there, and that they looked very much like Shakyans.
He returned to Ethnia and could never quite look at Buddhism the same way.
Elizabeth served empire in several ways.
It is important to remember that Empire crossed the Atlantic shortly before her reign and was also vindicated in doing so by the success of America in the war, so at her accession, the decisions about how to run the world were no longer being made in London, but in New York and Washington.
After the War, the Empire decided to consolidate power even further away from British aristocrats and the civil service – no more Lord Nonceberry being given personal rule over miles and miles of Africa! – so the decision was made that a heavily endebted British government had to withdraw its militaries and civil servants from various nations painted pink on the map. This had the effect of leaving those nations in need of a new protection racket, which the United States military could happily provide. It also allowed a shaking up of Empire trade to go from serving British capital, to serving Global capital – which is to say until quite recently, American capital.
Elizabeth was the chief mascot of this transition, to pacify domestic and foreign sentiment. Obviously in some places like India or Kenya where the oppression was too much and independence movements were fierce, nobody took it very seriously, but places like the white settler countries, Hong Kong, the various tax exile islands, her lifelong policy of sitting still and appearing to do absolutely nothing did significant moral service to the white governments.
Elizabeth saw herself as an active agent in decolonisation – and the example of South Rhodesia is instructive. The white settlers there declared independence from Britain but, tellingly, acclaimed Elizabeth as Queen of Rhodesia. In response, the British government refused to acknowledge this, but handed power of the colony personally to Elizabeth. Elizabeth refused to accept the South Rhodesian claims to government and cut the Prime Minister, acting as though he were an ordinary citizen. Rhodesia, scorned, declared themselves a republic and were treated as pariahs until ten years later the “International Community” (i.e. Empire) forced them to drop the white nationalism. Elizabeth sided against the local white government in favour of the imperial “multiracial” community.
Now she is dead, independence movements in those small countries are excited and think they have a chance because the spell has been broken. The fall of Babylon has been long expected.
Domestically, her continuity with British imperial power has been invaluable because it has allowed an increasingly gerontocratic government to worship the Old and contemn the Young. Central to the Imperial habit of mind is confidence, externalised in various fetishes of flag, nature, king, the whole kit. While Elizabeth was alive, all the conditioning from the era of her succession was still at work – people have been trained to project a significant amount of their souls onto her, and truly a part of them has died along with her. In this rather soulless age, I do not know what will happen to all these Tories, senior civil servants, churchmen, military officers, judges and so on because they had very little soul left even before she died, but look at the world outlook and tell me it will go well for them, if you can.
The Rhodesia affair, incidentally, happened around the same as the “racist hiring policies” incident, wherein the Palace lobbying exemption from the various race relations in employment laws of the period. It is entirely understandable that the Palace should desire to be free from red tape of this kind because they 1) have the enviable position of any organisation of being literally above the law in so many cases, so are motivated on a matter of principle to push back and 2) are one of the world’s top crime families and have the same incentives as any other gang trying to hide affairs from the authorities. They did not want foreigners to do sensitive work for them for the same reason you can’t get made in the Mafia unless you are Italian. This is the other great service for Empire that Elizabeth performed – a family boss must be a good friend to their friends, be a master of omertà, and not show their feelings even when, for instance, an intergenerational paedophile ring is exposed by the deaths of some infamous cutouts or, in one case, by a member of the ring being killed by a rival gang, or when it is decided that one wife must be killed to make way for a more suitable wife.
god bless king charles and queen camilla
tarot person on astrology podcast, expressing that of course you should run tarot like a business and charge charge charge. Doesn’t matter if you have a spiritual gift. Would you go to a doctor and expect them to consult with you for free??? We Don’t Do That!
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one time I was talking to a social justice type person – the type you will probably develop a picture of as you read on – about the witches in the Discworld books and how I thought they were a very clear example of a reactionary element being treated sympathetically by Pratchett — many such, in fact, but he worked his way into the hearts of a lot of floofy liberals qwho never noticed this.
The witches are clearly three types of old world confidence tricksters and predators on the agrarian poor, and there is nothing subtle about them – Nanny Ogg is a bullshitter who oppresses the hell out of her daughters-in-law and manipulates her family constantly, Granny Weatherwax is a sociopathic broker and sin eater, and Magrat is married to the local boss.
Pratchett makes you sympathise with these people by making their flattering self-images integral to the texture of the whole story, and works on making people who “don’t go along with the story” stand out — either within the story by being foreigners, or naughty peasants who break the moral code defined by the witches.
Pratchett was not stupid and he knew this, even if the fluffier fans didn’t realise. The metatextual theme of “the characters believe the world is fundamentally made out of stories, and they are right because they are literally characters in a story which Pratchett is writing” is in every novel. He keeps probing the theme of “how do I show what Granny Weatherwax’s self-justification looks like” which is difficult for this reason: The reason Weatherwax is right is simply because Pratchett has started with the premise she is, and because the Discworld works on the basis that the basic reality is the story, she must be. In-story there is nothing deeper to it, but because the witches are basically defined as being characters who do not believe in the basic reality of stories – i.e. the root of existence – they are fundamentally nihilist characters and are therefore forced onto a project of transvaluation. One should therefore expect to find examples of master morality leavened eith an old but “dangerous fascination” at work.
Which is also to say, in reality, they are puppets that Pratchett was using to do his own little work of transvaluation in a real world that he, too, clearly believed was beyond good and evil. Pratchett really got some rather nasty stuff out under a fluffy guise, and I think they will never be able to cancel him for it.
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tarot reader wondering why people were telling her tarot had scammy vibes, because she was always Professional about it – talks about how when giving readings she just wears a normal professional class woman costume with one (1) mystical scarf as her concession to Boffo. she goes to New York, discovers “neon light” fortune tellers. immediate disgust reaction – disgust deepens when she finds out the people there are standing outside making mystical passes, hawking for trade, charging hundreds of dollars for remedies. Vulgar! No wonder people think tarot has a scammy vibe! It’s Not Ethical. But here we have this professional organisation and isn’t it nice and clean?
[…interlocutor redacted…]
I agree that the text is very clear about this — Pratchettian heroes consistently take this view of “I do not believe in doing Good, just in being Right, and also I am Right”. Well, if they say so they must be! I am getting a good mark at understanding Pratchett by saying I can understand Pratchett.
I think I have also failed to put my point across to you, which is that there is much to say that goes beyond a simple reading of the text, and some fun can be derived by doing so:
Here’s Colin Wilson on The Right Man, on people who are Right, of not Good:
The notion of ‘losing face’ suggests an interesting alternative line of thought. It is obviously connected, for example, with the cruelty of Himmler and Stalin when their absolute authority was questioned. They were both men with a touchy sense of self-esteem, so that their response to any suspected insult was vindictive rage. Another characteristic of both men was a conviction that they were always right, and a total inability to admit that they might ever be wrong.
Himmlers and Stalins are, fortunately, rare; but the type is surprisingly common. The credit for recognising this goes to A. E. Van Vogt, a writer of science fiction who is also the author of a number of brilliant psychological studies. Van Vogt’s concept of the ‘Right Man’ or ‘violent man’ is so important to the understanding of criminality that it deserves to be considered at length,…
'the violent man' or the 'Right Man' [...] is a man driven by a manic need for self-esteem -- to feel he is a 'somebody'. He is obsessed by the question of 'losing face', so will never, under any circumstances, admit that he might be in the wrong."Wilson multiplies examples in his book to show that being a Right Man is not the right way to live — it makes tyrants who are useful most for cancelling out other Right Men. it makes criminals who just hurt people. Families that do not have Right Men in them are happier. There is no law of physics or society that says you have to have Right Men.
Another ruder name for Right Men is that they believe they are the Protagonist of Reality. In the real world, they are very wrong about this because there is no physical basis for “being a protagonist”, and they cause unjustifiable suffering by living as though they are.
But in the Discworld, where physics is based on “narrativium” — an in-world alchemisation of the out-world fact that “Everything here is imaginary, and Pratchett is making this up”, not only is ‘protagonist” a fundamental physical property, but it is one that a character can be right about. Granny Weatherwax believes she is the protagonist of reality and, well, she is. She is right.
Here’s the funny part: not only is she right, but she is Right. You can easily write, and postmodernist writers have mined this seam to exhaustion, a story about a character who knows she is the protagonist, but who has many different attitudes towards this — curiosity, playfulness, absurdity, wish-fulfillment, religious yearning… Granny Weatherwax, though is Right. She is Right in the way that the familiar Right Man is right. She has a self-righteous sense of her own authority, is right about what other people need to do with their lives, and has a self-concept of Being A Person Who Does The Right Thing.
This is why Pratchett is clever. It’s not an accident, and he develops the character of Granny Weatherwax with this coincidence of right and Right in mind. He takes the fantasy of every Right Man and asks “well, what if he is right as well as Right? What would the world have to be like to be like that?”. Disc-shaped.
Here’s the next level of fun: Granny Weatherwax’s self-righteousness is such that she is an arch-blasphemer. She famously knows gods exist, but doesn’t believe in them because it “would encourage them” (to what?). She has not to believe in them, despite the evidence of her senses, to keep up the primacy of herself as being a Right Witch, because she cannot allow Good and Evil to exist. But she is a created being, created by a divine entity in a celestial realm above her, and the entity’s name is Pratchett. This has two consequences: first, Granny Weatherwax is right not to believe in the gods as being the source of Good and Evil, because they really are very secondary characters. Secondly, one common understanding of the Good is doing that which the divine creator wants you to do, and Granny Weatherwax cannot do anything else but what the divine creator wants, because she is a fictional character entirely composed of letters typed by Pratchett. From the Discworld point of view, Granny Weatherwax is Good, and she is wrong about this.
The above part is a little pedantic, but I justify it by adding another fun point that I haven’t used yet — Granny Watherwax is a magician and the whole point of magic is to attain knowledge of the Higher Realms. Granny Weatherwax, we may assume, since she is the most accomplished witch on the Disc, an ipsissima, (who turned down a mystical union with someone who turned out to become the most accomplished wizard on the Disc) knows everything there is that it is possible for a Disc magician to know, and so she must have some understanding of her true nature as a fictional entity. This doesn’t make sense, but this is normal for magic.
I also withheld something in the previous – the whole point of magic is not just to attain knowledge of higher realms, but also to gain power over them. If Granny Weatherwax is a supreme magician then she is not only aware that she is a fictional entity in a world of real entities, but that she can fuck around with the real entities.
This is not as crazy as it sounds once you remember that the Higher Realms are not full of devas and Great White Brothers, but just people who write and read fantasy novels. Granny Weatherwax is a character created by Terry Pratchett, primarily I would say to fuck with himself and play with the idea of “someone who is Right and right”, but also to fuck with other people, who now have Ipsissima Weatherwax fucking around with them and changing the way they see the world she lives in.
I repeat my claim that Pratchett was doing a lot more than his public image as a harmless scribbler would suggest.
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I forgot to mention Vimes because lacking any magic proficiency as he does, he is a more simple kind of thug, and as we are living in this Year of Our Floyd 2, the problems with “He’s a working class cop…. who doesn’t believe in good and evil… just doing what he thinks is Right… and knows what he Has To Do… and is never passed up for promotion…” are obvious even for liberals, but it’s easier to miss with the witches.
The theme of the Vimes storyline is “Certain character flaws leave you open to being easily groomed and manipulated by the powers that be”. Vetinari knows that Vimes has a very grand and flattering idea of himself. At every stage in his social advancement from thug to commander-in-chief, he bitches and moans that he is going unwillingly, and that each step is an offense against what is Right, but he very clearly relishes every promotion once he gets it, and finds that it’s Right for him to occupy this higher level of authority after all. He could very easily say “no”, but never does- the implication being that the street arab at the beginning had within him the character of a duke all along, and all it took was someone to recognise hia inner worth and draw it out for him. Not only does he have a flattering self image, but he is practically a Disney princess. You know, I hope, what happens to Disney princesses in real life.
[…interlocutor redacted…]
I was careful to say that Vimes has a “grand and flattering” self-image, and that at each stage in his promotion he rises to the occasion of being Right. I do not say he has a “good self-image”. it is slightly galling to be accused of not having read or not understanding the books by people who show evidence of not even having read or understood my posts.
Vimes “knows he is bad” is not quite right. Vimes not actually that bad a man. As Pratchett says, “Vimes is fundamentally a person”. At his worst, he was a cynical self-pitying drunk with a bad temper that came out occasionally, and not unjustifiably. He has a “grand and flattering” self-image, but he is too perceptive to be able to decieve himself he is perfect, and this is the motor for the inner conflict. Everyone has intrusive thoughts, everyone notices things that should not be mentioned, everyone notices their flaws and failings, and in everyone it invokes a little pain, but for someone with a “grand and flattering” self-image, the pain is tremendous.
“I have done that’, says my memory. I cannot have done that—says my pride and remains unshakeable. Finally—memory yields.Vimes is aware of this Nietzschian maxim and sees it at work at every level from petty criminals he arrests (Incidentally, there are very few instances of normal police brutality being shown in the Watch books, do you notice? Everywhere in the world, it’s quite usual for police to jump on suspects and beat them black and blue but not in Ankh-Morpork, and then mostly by the Other Lot) to his ducal peers. He sees it in himself and does not like it. What is his solution? Fortunately, as well as being, I repeat myself, “grandiose and flattering”, his self-concept is also about “being Right” which he calls “justice”. What he does is recruit his tremendous pride to the service of memory, and creates talismans like the whiskey bottle in the drawer.
I keep repeating “flattering” as one of a pair because this is shown in another talisman he has created. He has created a “beast”, one might say a “Great Beast” that is situated within him, that is capable, in fantasy, of doing “such things – what they are yet, he knows not, but they shall be the terrors of the Disc”. I do not think Vimes really has it in him any more than any man of his capacity to commit great horrors. I think he is flattering himself by extrapolating from the evidence of his senses that he has a deep and unusual capacity within himself for great evil.
Thud! and Snuff I think are bad books and part of their badness is how they reify this grandiose self-image. They are a little comical in their orientalism even. A White-coded aristocrat, on mission to solve an ancient crime/war/political crisis among East-coded dwarves and trolls, whose native holy men impart a secret to him – you are not delusional, you are not spinning tales about yourself. No, padawan, this Beast within you is real, and it is an Ancient Terror!!! Why, yes, we are trying to refound the basis of our respective religions on an irenic basis to fit the new liberal Ankh-Morpork world order, and yes it seems you, the representative of the city at the head of that new world order now have a deeply personal stake in the whole thing! And “cynical” Vimes swallows it whole. Thus the Orient seduces the Occidental cynic, who becomes as a trusting child among such wise children.
At the very beginning of Guards! Guards!, Vimes’ groomability is made clear in the text. I will quote it at length and perhaps this will help me beat the duck allegations:
He always felt uneasy in the presence of Lupine Wonse. Come to that, he felt uneasy in the presence of Lord Vetinari—but that was different, that was down to breeding. And ordinary fear, of course. Whereas he’d known Wonse since their childhood in the Shades. The boy had shown promise even then. He was never a gang leader. Never a gang leader. Hadn’t got the strength or stamina for that. And, after all, what was the point in being the gang leader? Behind every gang leader were a couple of lieutenants bucking for promotion. Being a gang leader is not a job with long-term prospects. But in every gang there is a pale youth who’s allowed to stay because he’s the one who comes up with all the clever ideas, usually to do with old women and unlocked shops; this was Wonse’s natural place in the order of things.
Vimes had been one of the middle rankers, the falsetto equivalent of a yes-man. He remembered Wonse as a skinny little kid, always tagging along behind in hand-me-down pants with the kind of odd skipping run he’d invented to keep up with the bigger boys, and forever coming up with fresh ideas to stop them idly ganging up on him, which was the usual recreation if nothing more interesting presented itself. It was superb training for the rigors of adulthood, and Wonse became good at it.
Yes, they’d both started in the gutter. But Wonse had worked his way up whereas, as he himself would be the first to admit, Vimes had merely worked his way along. Every time he seemed to be getting anywhere he spoke his mind, or said the wrong thing. Usually both at once.
That was what made him uncomfortable around Wonse. It was the ticking of the bright clockwork of ambition.Vimes and Wonse were in the same gang all along – they both graduated from the Cockbill Street gang to the Ankh-Morpork civil service. We don’t know who groomed Wonse, but we do know who groomed Vimes: Vimes was groomed into the civil service by a distinguished aristocrat with military and intellligence connections under cover. As in many cases, the aristocrat was, in fact, a family relation of Vimes, and the only unusual thing about this nepotism is that that relation was one of identity. In genealogical jargon, that is called “Ego”, by the way.
What happens to Wonse is the plot of the whole book, but briefly, Wonse has a “grand and flattering” image of himself as a power broker who… summons a Beast. How interesting! It is in the aftermath of this beast-summoning incident, and the subsequent loss of Wonse that the Palace first notices the capacity of Vimes, and he begins the “upward” phase of his career. Vimes is clearly a superior model of Wonse from the same factory – he is biddable, and has a very similar gangster “grand and flattering” ego that can be played, but unlike Wonse, Vimes can be trusted to act basically pro-socially because he thinks that being a little rude to his betters and having a substance abuse problem (rather than eg. attempting to overthrow the government with magic) satisfies his dark dream of “proving a villain”.
Wonse’s problem was trying to summon a beast to physical appearance rather than keeping it inside his head once evoked. This is why I don’t like Thud! – Vimes is corrupted by the oriental equivalent of the occultists in Guards! Guards! into externalising the beast, which weakens his character (again in a non-moral sense, but here meaning “having an aesthetically coherent view of a psyche”) and makes him a half-Wonse, but maybe you could be dialectical with it if you think Pratchett’s late books are worth rescuing.
The Disney Princess comparison was very bad and I regret making it, but perhaps you will like the “Victorian Occultist Civil Servant” better?