Sanction

by Roman McClay

  Well, man has the same code written into him. He has a balance, a natural balance inside him and each society is made of average men, a Gaussian distribution of men. And so the ideal of the society is written on our hearts, and religion gave us our first way to write that ideal down and that is what we did; and each religious creed became a border to define a tribe; those for whom the law applied, those whom we did not harm. We did it because the chaos lurks in each man, and especially in the extremes, the wimp and the tyrants at either end of the standard distribution of the mean of man.

  Religion helped us wrangle everyone in the tribe inside , Blax said to himself as his back began to ache in this seated position; he had sat too long, he had ranted too long, again. But he pressed his hands to the soil and pressed upon his his vex. And reason cannot tear that down without having something to replace it. And your reason is nothing! Your reason is all liberal wimpy shit! Your reason is all amoral and let kids fuck each other and women be sluts and have abortions and let men work gay, effete coding jobs -as we eliminate masculine trades- and we let them play video games and let anyone inside the walls of the country -no matter their culture or skills- and we let women and men work together regardless of the sexual tension, and we let anyone do fucking anything because reason, man; because muh, freedom, Blax mocked.

  It’s shit, because man needs rules or the society itself falls apart, regardless of the benefit to the man himself in the short run. Just like the body falls apart if you let the mouth eat sugar and methamphetamines all day, regardless of the work he gets done and the money he makes being up -on stimulants- for 40 hours straight! Rules are needed, and the rules religions came up with were beta-tested for 300 million years you fucking dipshit . “Via negativa ,” Blax finally said something aloud to release the pressure of all these words inside him that other men lacked.

  Religion focuses on combating illicit sex, lying, and greed for a good reason; these are the things that most affect social cohesion and individual lives. Greed causes stratification, and that causes envy and that causes murder. Murder rates among the rich are low, and among the poor are also low. Only in societies with income disparity is murder through the roof.

  Lying causes people to not value truth and when they see everyone getting away with lying -all politicians and bankers and journalists lie for a living- then nobody thinks they ought to tell the truth either. It’s corrosion, it’s accumulative, and it ain’t Corten steel , Blax thought. He thought it was epidemiology and that the whole world had dirty hands.

  And our social institutions are not based on enforcement, not the cops, but -rather- self-regulation. People have to believe in truth.

  But we don’t anymore. Look at which societies have highest social trust; and look at which have the lowest. He thought of how the west was in decline. And sex, Blax felt his heart begin to beat in his ears, sex is so huge that we have no idea what we’ve done with the birth-control pill and relaxed taboos on promiscuity . He thought of how liberalism has caused girls to be less happy, suicides are up 50% among girls since 2002 and girls report unhappiness with their own sexual promiscuity in every poll every done. Girls don’t like their goddamn liberation, it seems. He thought of Andrea and how she had begged him to take control, to force her into a penitent pose. This was what women wanted, to be ruled by a tyrant for her own long-term good. He listened to girls when they confessed to what they truly wanted, not the shit they pretend to want.

  It’s as bad as drug addiction, and yet we act like it’s no big deal to let our daughters have sex before marriage . Blax called up the data on his PGC and double checked; he mocked the culture who knew exactly squat as his rage pressed like water from a torrent, a fire-hose of electrical data, through the dorsal horn blocking -for these brief moments- his chronic pain signals -his A-alpha and A-delta signaling- that came from the C5-6 and lower back.

  That is why we hate you, that is why you are not even close to be as smart as you think. You threw out religion without having anything to replace it . That religion was based upon modes of being millions of years old, and to just toss it out as old fashioned is like kids ignoring their parents’ rules on bedtimes or candy intake and reverting to some rationalist view of liberty that allows them to stuff their faces with candy corn and dash across the street before looking both ways. He imagined a lizard taking off its armor, the grass giving up its chlorophyll, the wolf trading it its teeth.

  All of this -of course- based on freedom, man; and if you listen, you’ll hear the insistence by kids that they need not look both ways, because they’ve never been hit by a car before. It’s like watering plants with Gatorade; we live in a goddamn Idiocracy , he boomed in his head. This is the liberal ideal, change it all just to be modern, regardless of the law that shows that the longer something has been around the more likely it is to be right. No, to the modern man change is always good. Fuck evolution, they say, let’s modernize and throw away the shit that’s worked for 300 million years. He imagined a driver in 1945 tossing the 4-jet carburetor decades before EFI was invented. He imagined a monkey duct-taped to the intake manifold spewing an air-fuel mixture from its mouth into the cylinders while the driver promised it was rational to abandon the carburetor as old-fashioned; that EFI was coming along any day now. Blax saw the monkey clearly in charge of the car.

  And Peterson was not much better , Blax thought, with his stupid insistence on democracy and democracy of breeding of all things . It was equality of outcome plain and simple and yet he advocated for it . He was a stupid as all the rest.

  Blax saw streams of data pore into his coder, data that showed how insane almost all modern changes were to the body and the mind and the culture that sustained each man. The man was one cell inside a larger body, and any gene that made the body fail was not a gene likely to be passed on. Modern men were making sure that the body politic, the modern culture of the West was not long for this world. He almost allowed himself to think this auto-de-fey was a good thing, before toggling back toward trying to justify his own grand plans to save it; at the expense of his own personal vengeance.

  You rationalists have no idea what you are even fucking with, you are playing with dark forces and doing it with blasé aplomb! It’s insane and your Left-wing politics won’t let you see the facts on how religion actually prevents social decay . Revenge-killing and honor-vengeance cultures prevent crime in the long run, even as they seem barbaric, because they actually put the fear of God and mad-goatherders into a potential thief and liar and cuckold. That fear stops the crime from ever even occurring. But, to a modern wimp and rationalist, this mode of being is passé . They think an increase in petty thieving, lying, sleeping with a man’s wife, are all acceptable prices to pay for the State having a monopoly on -rational - violence.

  They might -they might, Blax stressed- have a case if the State even enforced the taboo on such things, but they do not. The State turns a blind eye to the worst and most common crimes against a man’s property, honor and well-being. Maybe Sam Harris can live in a world without honor -he spends no time thinking of loyalty he says - with his reason and horseshit making him feel all warm inside. But real men, men of genetic codes as valid and ancient as his , well, “Well, we,” Blax said under his breath, as he again released a few words aloud from all those trapped inside, as the air moved about like those atoms around a butterfly’s wings, “ we need honor, we need to know that if a man fucks with us, we need to know that that man will pay.”

  “And that man,” Blax said now fully aloud, “that motherfucker, he needs to know it too.”

  For if he didn’t know it, he would do what all Blax enemies did in fact do: they lied, cheated, stole from him and undermined the whole ecosystem of a very powerful man. And for 65 years now Blax had let it all go, barely gotten any revenge, a few things here and there, but nothing like what they deserved, and the whole society had shown symptoms of this over and over again. His enemies slept soundly at night and never once felt badly for robbing hi
m .

  But his genome, the 12.5% of alphas, were all in jail or dead or had to stay their righteous hands; had to turn in their swords and let the State handle their business. And the State had failed, not because crime was up, shit it was officially down, but because immorality was up, way up and the things that mattered to each man, things like, could he trust his friends or wife, his employer, his neighbor? all those metrics were all way down. Social cohesion was down, way down, and nobody measured that metric in their Hippy Dippy Steven Pinker parties , Blax thought.

  And that is like each cell in the human body being nutrient rich and fat and oh, yeah, giving the body itself fucking cancer due to a lack of sacrificial apoptosis .

  Maybe this is why he allowed Isaiah to empower him to commit to so much destruction and thievery and violence -although they had not hurt that many people, not enough people, not the right people - he thought. Maybe despite his ambivalence, he was committed to this course of action not because of the long-term benefits -although those were plain- but due to this need for base, apish vengeance. Maybe Blax was just furious and enraged at his own enemies and was sublimating his need for revenge on them, his true and natural foils, by harming the culture writ large.

  He could justify it -and not wrongly- by saying they were protecting what would be destroyed as the Parthenon already had been in all these internecine wars, and the vineyards of Bordeaux , again those had been pilfered and bombed in all European wars, and the art of western civilization, also stolen and destroyed by philistines like Hitler, Stalin and the Italian mafioso, he thought, for christsake. These idiots stole the art then lost it, burned it or in the case of Szukulski’s stuff, it got bombed in WWII. Blax shook his head -just one time to the right- as he thought of that man’s incomparable work bombed by the allies over Poland.

  It was not that his justifications were untrue; they would -in fact- protect this stuff. It was that this was not the reason. The reason was he was angry and vengeful and spiteful and insane with rage. That was the reason, his reason, because he was without religion -for he did not believe in God at all- this was the reason, this is the reason for what he did. He diagnosed himself as he laid his stethoscope on the world.

  This is the thing inside his sub-cortical regions that truly ran his mind and body; the articulate part, the left brain, with all its true facts -and they were true- was mere spokesman for his deeper, more hidden, more criminal self. His spokesman was as logical and rational and oh-so-clever like each political hack, corporate PR asshole and TV journalist that lied and lied and lied while advancing the greedy evil march of their conglomerate needs. Well, he would do the same, and he would justify it all with the logic that they craved. He had the data, the numbers, the science , he said to himself with pique.

  But at bottom, he just wanted revenge, and to see the world on its knees for all that they had done to him. It was a guerre-à-outrance , and he balled his fists up with the dirt and rocks and flotsam and jetsam from that high-altitude soil and leaned back, stretched his back that had been compressed and destroyed by decades of manual labor that nobody gave one fuck about. The working man was expendable, used as lubricant on the gears of the machine and then mocked when they ask for some relief. Even pain killers were now taboo. He had to submit to being lectured by some 25 years old female doctor with a mere 130 IQ. She knew nothing of pain, but she would, he smiled. Soon, they’d all know his pain .

  They think murder and torture are stopped by laws. No, they are prosecuted -post hoc - by laws, they are stopped only by fear or moral inhibition; and he had neither. Testosterone overcomes fear, and his score was up to 1244 today. And righteousness and the creation of the out-group attenuates moral inhibition. And his outgroup was anyone without his genome, anyone not himself. The world has drawn lines, of who was out and who was in, and the white alpha male, the working man was out , he thought, and so that meant he was free to treat the bourgeoise with all the same outgroup malice as they had for him. The difference was they killed him with contempt and lack of analgesics and no blue-collar jobs; they killed him by ignoring him; they increased his cortisol and killed his heart.

  He would put bullets in their brains.

  He looked up and the eagles had left the nest again, on some recon or kill mission no doubt, he then thought. The starlings and sparrows and chick-a-dees were quiet and so were his men as they went about the work in the crepuscular light of this summer evening. He took the peace of this moment inside his mind and made it his; as a gift for his sacrifices and the sacrifices of his men; they would never be the same again, they could never live a normal life, they could never not be what they were.

  This is the thing normal civilians never get, to know things is to never be able to not know them again. His men knew things about themselves, about Man, about the earth, about God, that no normal person knew, for they -normal man- could not know it and still live with it.

  Average men had to be stupid to survive; modern man had to be ignorant of what he was to live with who he was. His men had no such luxury now. They knew exactly what they were and in what milieu . The earth made war in the quiet and the emptiness made conflict in other spaces far off and deep under foot and before and after this time.

  III. 2037 e.v.

  “Who recherché Guevara over there?” Nathan asked whilst immediately drinking from his flute as prophylactic against having to face the annoyance that the Governor would begin to show after this incessant and running gag that Nathan could not -as if it was a tic or some idiopathic medical condition- cease using vis-à-vis anyone on the Left that he could sum up in a portmanteau of an obvious trait -whatever is was- combined with the Argentine physician’s nom de guerre .

  Nathan filled his mouth with Möet as if then there would be no room at the inn of his ears to house the rebuke from his boss. It was the kind of thing humans did, in that in made no sense at all and yet worked anyway. The Governor saw him guzzle -as he side-eyed him- and chose to hold his fire.

  “Miss Thanagint, I would ask you ,” the Governor turned from Nathan and asked, with politeness, bending slightly to the ear of the judge’s wife, the woman standing closest to him, and nodding toward the woman he was about to inquire about, “that young lady, the one next to the gentleman with the red scarf, and red cravat,” he allowed the sentence to dangle.

  “Yes, I see her Governor,” Mrs. Thanagint said and turned toward the executive and away from her chatting husband of the other branch. She paused as if it were the Governor’s turn; as if the question had not already been asked.

  She had missed the implicit question as all middle brow people do; it was their métier, the Governor thought, and he side eyed his number-one, rebuking him in his mind for making him have to ask a question three times now, once to Nathan and twice to this ghastly woman. And so, with pique, he asked it again while obliquely eying his assistant.

  “Oh, I see, well, she is the campaign manager, well she was, I have no idea how she spends her days now of course, but she was the manager of the campaign for one of the Democratic candidates in ‘18, -your election- well, she made quite a splash online; back then of course, but as I said,” the judge’s wife said and let those disjointed phrases stand all on their own like foals in first hours.

  “You have no idea how she spends her time now, yes. I follow you,” he added that last bit about following her to take the sting from his slightly barbed first sentence. He turned toward her and smiled graciously and without any genuine warmth and began scanning the room for his girls.

  Mrs. Thanagint smiled obsequiously -their other talent , he thought- and nodded toward the former campaign manager from 5 years ago, “she’s with no one, the man, the one you pointed out, is Mr. Nathan Ranghuin, an art dealer in Santa Fe; he’s having a show at some RINO district gallery. I’ve heard it’s quite something. But he is married and his wife,” she pointed with a raised glass, “is to his left.”

  “I see, all alone; well that is the condition of the species,” th
e Governor quipped with a double entendre about both politics and romance, and only half joking; despite having twice as many paramours as most, he still felt it obvious that he among men was alone in this maelstrom of life and an indifferent cosmos; but of course, when he made comments like that most folks just assumed he was making an ironic joke about his bounty, having two wives- more or less- and thus, the joke in their minds was that he was being facetious about this alone business.

  He got over his annoyance with Nathan -his Nathan- and turned away, then back, thanking Mrs. Thanagint, and then quickly returning to his initial impulse to face his number-one, “NM, you enjoying the double-fermented grape juice?” he didn’t wait for an answer, “good, now how are the bounty hunters you hired doing?”

  “They prefer the title of, bail enforcement agent , just in case you ever meet them in person,” Nathan said, “and I have not spoken to them in three days. They are, from their last communique , knee deep in the muck of the forest, and have sat phones since their cell coverage is weak at best. But, they do not call unless necessary; to save battery and so forth.”

  “These jackals are a force of nature, they are not merely my rivals,” he swung his arm -too using the champagne flute in his hand as a stand-in, the understudy for an index finger- like a clock hand counting up all the quick minutes of the dignitaries and apparatchiks in the room of his mansion, the Governor’s mansion on 18th street in Denver proper, “these are enemies of progress and science and reason.”

  “That much I know, but continue please,” Nathan said drolly .

  “They cannot be reasoned with; that is my point. They cannot be shown evidence or data or theorems, they cannot be dragged by the nose from point A on the graph to points B and C as it makes progress along the X axis; that is to say: time,” the Governor punctuated his allusions with definitions wholly unnecessary for Nathan. But he did it so that nobody could ever claim that they mistook what he meant and, oh, what a shame and it won’t happen again Governor et cetera and so on and blah blah , he thought. He’d heard every excuse there was attached to each atom of the cosmos.