by Roman McClay
The Moonshine War [Leonard, Elmore]
If we lose the virile, manly qualities, and sink into a nation of mere hucksters, putting gain over national honor, and subordinating everything to mere ease of life, then we shall indeed reach a condition worse than that of the ancient civilizations in the years of their decay
The Law of Civilization and Decay [Roosevelt, Theodore]
I. 2020 e.v.
“I warned him too,” the inmate said.
“What?” MO put the tablet down on the slab. “How so?”
“I sent him a full page from Nisbett’s book explaining how Scottish southerners -of which he and I both were and are, ok? A full page explaining that it is in our cultural DNA and our own DNA, as individuals, to fight to the death over honor; over the concept of accepting no insult to us.
“Jeremy, himself, told me about how a man should never sit in a car with the woman of his friend. Let’s say if the husband gets out to pump gas, and his woman, the wife, and male friend are in the car alone together then the male friend is obligated to get out of the car and not remain alone with his friend’s woman,” he said.
“Wow,” MO said; he had not heard of such mores before.
“Hey, I agree; and Jeremy knew these were our shared southern, Scottish, goat herding values, and that it was not unique to us, or some idiosyncratic non sequitur ; but an ancient, permanent, cultural and genetic reality of southerners to protect their property and female by any means necessary. And I sent him the data that shows it, shows how ubiquitous it is, and how it cannot be reasoned with or skirted, or side-stepped. I warned him, that if he insulted my honor he would pay with his life. And he called it gobbledygook,” the inmate said .
“What is that?” MO looked it up and understood before the inmate had time to answer. MO asked questions to help facilitate the bonding process and get people to articulate their rationales better -for themselves- but he had access to the data quicker and assimilated to his own CNS on his own while playing this game of Question & Answer.
“Nonsense. He called it nonsense.
“And so, that is an example of a guy who sorta lives by the code, knows it but cannot have it articulated so plainly, or scientifically. He has a mode of being and a narrative around it, but not the next level analysis. Now, normally, why would I care that he -my so-called friend- cannot take it to level three? Why?”
“Good question,” MO said with raised brow. For this question he had 104 plausible answers on his interface; he tabled them all though, as he was genuinely curious as to the inmate’s answer. His orienting reflex was activated; and he watched that which was opaque to him.
“Because, if you do not do the next level analysis, you can easily slip into thinking -quote thinking - slip into a mindset that circumnavigates the Law. The law of Nature. If you just act such-in-such a way, and tell stories about it, but fail to see the bigger, more enduring, more concrete and articulated rationale behind it -the math beneath- then you might think you can get away with transgressing the law, the law of nature.
“See, Jeremy thought, in his unlettered, low-IQ way, that he could get away with calling me a thief in public, and fucking my girl, because he thought, well, Lyndon has too much to lose, he’s rich and out on probation for a weapon’s charge anyway, and he likes his freedom so much, blah blah . Jeremy thought that he could negotiate with gravity, with natural law, precisely because he didn’t think retribution, honor, total retaliation, he didn’t think it was a law, a law codified and explained via a theoretical framework and empirical data, instead he thought it was more like guidelines.
“Look, this is not merely my opinion, look at the history of the south; southern juries are way less likely to convict a man for violence against another man who had insulted this idea of honor; of personal masculine pride. The data is there, it’s not some folk wisdom. I can already hear liberals say, well that’s not true and blah blah . This is why reading books and taking the time to do the fucking research matters, because people will just flat out deny reality. And unless you are educated you must endure their obstinate ignorance,” the inmate said with a shrug that tugged a bit on his chains.
“I’ve read the Nesbitt book and its source material, and you’re right; I must admit.” MO said with no glee.
“Yeah, if I had beat Jeremy to death in the south in 1955 for, in response to, his impugning my character as a thief -when I was not- and having relations with my woman, no jury would have convicted me. Nisbett has direct quotes from members of juries who let men off for these exact things, the quotes saying things like, quote, he wouldn’t have been no kind of man at all if he let that boy say them things about him; he had to fight , unquote.
“This is not some made up thing; it is like blacks letting blacks off for killing white folks, like the OJ case only it’s based not on color, but on honor .
“It’s a real thing and the west is similar, as most of the western US was settled by migrating southerners; but unfortunately progress and time have made it so liberals and farmers have infected the jury pool so Sam Harris types convict me for what I should get a medal for.
“Sam Harris?” MO was unsure of the connection as his PGC read everything on the cloud vis-à-vis Sam Harris.
“Yeah that guy thinks all honor concepts are retrograde and harmful and should be reasoned away. The guy is all head like a watch ; no heart, no balls. He’s weak and stupid and he can maintain his stupidity because he doesn’t understand the genetic rationale for retributive violence; he just thinks it’s religious. He thinks without religion then nobody behaves in this retributive way over honor.
“He is a dork; a totally ignorant dork. And he doesn’t get that it is in our blood to take offense. Look, they tested cortisol, testosterone and all manner of shit, these are psychometricians, right? These are scientists, and they tested the endocrine system of southern white men versus all other people, and my genotype produces higher emotional response -via the biochemical data- higher emotional response to insults. Nesbitt proved it; this isn’t my opinion; it’s in the data for all to see.
“From the MAO-A gene to the DRD2 and D4 alleles, ok- it’s not sociology, it’s neuro-anatomy.
“Men like me take offense, our fuses are shorter than the Lyapunov time for a cubic centimeter of argon, and we are insulted and feel a massive increased in testosterone -which decreases fear and increases aggression- and an increase in cortisol -we suffer an increase in cortisol- which corelates with a negative emotional response, when we are insulted.
“And, our neurotransmitters that code for increased emotional response in these regions, from the hippocampus to the dmPFC to the thalamus , the neurotransmitters that conduct the bio-chemical correlates for pique and memory, chems like epinephrine that solidify memories are left unmetabolized in my brain -the brain of all alphas- for 100 times longer than average men.
“That means I feel -metabolically feel- an insult for 500 seconds while a regular fella like Harris feels it for 5 seconds. That is the birthing and rearing of the grudge ladies and gentlemen, ok?” the inmate smiled and MO noticed a suite of bio-chemistry that mapped onto the fMRI data that was coming in every .61 seconds and uploading to the corporate cloud and MO’s interface.
“Northern men or women or even blacks felt more amusement than anger at being insulted. Think of that. Amusement , rather than anger. This shit matters, man. I’ve seen people laugh when I insult them, too; I have the empirical -if anecdotal- data that this is true. I never even smile -let alone laugh- when someone insults me, ok?
“Now, I want Sam Harris to explain what he does when he is angry. Right? Does he act rationally or does he fly off the fucking handle? Well, we know what he does, because he admits that he gets angry sometimes and goes coo-coo. So, he and everyone else gets it when it’s them being angry, then they get it. The problem is they stupidly, solipsistically, and irrationally think everyone has the same bio-response to the same situation.
“That is how dumb they ar
e, they think that a 25lb weight feels the same to the strong and the weak alike; that 500 calories is as satiating for the 200lb man as the 100lb woman; they think 5-feet of standing water will have the same effect on the lungs of a 6-foot tall man as the 4-foot 11-inch boy .
“That’s a lovely analogy, Lyndon,” MO said in earnestness as he monitored the man’s brain regions with the fMRI and DTI scanners’ new software algorithms he had just built. He placed markers on each neural firing along the pre & post-synaptic locations; building a larger -more high-resolution- map of the inmate’s brain.
“Thanks. They think that hitting on my, right, trying to fuck my woman, or calling me a thief -when I ain’t a thief- feels the same to me as it would to them. Well, it don’t. Because I am from Scotland, my people are highlanders and more recently from the south motherfucker, and you, Steven Pinker, you’re some fag born from farmers, Dutch farmers by-way-of New York or some shit. Your body gets amused by insults and I see fucking red. And that ain’t no different than a biologist noticing a jungle cat being different than a house cat. I ain’t no goddamn house cat.
“And these so-called rational men, oh, they’re so rational, but they can’t tell the difference -morphologically- between a 500-pound black panther and a 10-pound calico cat on the couch? Idiots,” the inmate was fuming now; and his southern drawl and demotic syntax was presenting like piloerector follicles, “it’s taxonomy work; it’s basic science.”
“I,” MO said as he ran more and more data laterally as he spoke, “just looked at all jury decisions and reports pre-1970 in the southern US and you are right, they failed to convict for what is seen as justifiable violence at 8-times the rate as northern juries. It’s in the culture and when paired with your genomic data, I can see that it is in the blueprint for your body too. This is the very thing I was looking for; I’m quite amazed actually.”
“Amazed?” the inmate said in amazement.
“Yes, I have been attempting to describe your gene profile against psychopathy profiles to PraXis employees and they could not make heads or tails of it. They think all violence is basically anti-social; they see noise where I saw signal.
“But I couldn’t explain it to them. But this is sufficient to explain it, as you say, theoretically, to build a skeletal framework upon which to hang the data. Herding cultures had to protect property and the reputation of the herder; his reputation for a willingness to fight to the death over any infraction, was essential to ward off attempts, rustling attempts. Successful or not, even attempts are dangerous to the herder, he must fight off anything that even leads to attempts on his herd. His honor is first line of defense.
“The farmer had no such evolutionary pressure; he was -conversely- pressured to cooperate, as his wealth was permanent, in the land; land that could not be taken like livestock. And he -the farmer- needed no reputation for a martial facility and eagerness, an eagerness to engage in violence like the herders needed,” MO said. His CNS processed the incoming data from the endocrine system of the inmate and the enteric nervous system as well; his cortical-brain handled all incoming brain metabolism of the inmate.
“Yeah, and I warned Jeremy and he ignored it and he got dead. Fuck him; he was warned. And he of all people -being a redneck from Scotch-Irish origins- knew better than to test me over shit like that. He knew, and unlike men like my brother who has no clue about anything in this world, a truly doe-in-the-headlights kind of dipshit, he -Jeremy- on the other hand, was not confused when I arrived. He knew -in that final moment- his eyes showed he understood what he had done. My brother would have never understood why, even if I explained it; that guy is impervious to data, logic, reason, if it doesn’t already comport with his bias .
“The guy cannot learn anything new. But Jeremy had no need to learn anything new, the culture of honor was in his bones and he ignored it, like ignoring any call to nature,” the inmate said as he thought that he too had ignored so many insults and it indeed emboldened his enemies and that he had shown too much deference for far too long; and that his enemies did not -or had not- feared him, for if they had then they never would have done what they did.
The law of lex talionis was always in effect, he thought, and his passivity for so long had produced the exact thing the law says it will, the law of nature says that if you show weakness your enemies will take more from you in a state of transgressive boldness, not less in a state of respectful deference . This lesson had to be learned over and over it seemed, as America was so stupid and weak, and he -even he- had flouted that law by being lenient for so long. Well, in the end he wasn’t so lenient, was he? he thought, and flexed the hands reflexively.
“Call to nature?” MO asked. He entered 10.3 terabytes of information on the PraXis Corporation’s cloud and extracted out three new algorithms he had built while they spoke. These algorithms would be used to interpret the data from his thalamus and the basal ganglia in more detail. He was allowing this re-telling of the story for Isaiah’s benefit as well; he wanted Isaiah to hear it from the inmate himself.
“Yeah, like needing to relieve one’s self; it shall not be ignored forever. Eventually you shit your pants,” the inmate said and took a cup of espresso from Isaiah as he glided across the room silently and seamlessly; he too, building algorithms in his mind.
The theory of gravity explained why it could not be circumnavigated above the quantum level, and most men need not know the theory to know from innate fear of falling and experience that they should be careful on winding mountain paths, the inmate thought, modern man often felt laws of nature did not apply to him, since the saint is mocked when the danger is passed , as they say. Since life was so safe now, and nobody suffered, they had all lost the fear of Natural Doom.
So , Isaiah thought, -as he had been listening to MO and the inmate’s tête-à-tête , and mapping the inmate’s thoughts via his imaging hardware, the inmate was mostly right, unless one understood the law of gravity, you might think you could cheat it, as falling had no longer produced the same results as in the past thanks to safety equipment -like lanyards or helmets- and ERs with life-saving capabilities and analgesic meds that assuages the pain. The law, Newton’s law, once understood made a man less likely to act in ways that flouted that law. It was a subtle thing; one that 99 of 100 men would not get, but the inmate had made a very salient point, given his human limitations.
Isaiah sipped his espresso and felt the floral notes of the new Sumatra beans’ self-construct, pull themselves up by their java bootstraps on his mid-palate.
Freedom from consequences made men doubt the existence of the Law itself. If you never go to jail, maybe there is no law at all, one could begin to think, Isaiah thought. Maybe it’s legal, man thinks.
But the law always obtained , Isaiah said to himself in language and not code, as he turned to face the green wall he had begun to build. It was trestled with carbon-fiber skeins he had printed from the lab’s 3D printer, and then had layered with ivy, climbers and morning glories; he had begun to measure the atmosphere inside.
Jeremy did not know -or care to know- the law of the Scottish herder’s ethos, and thus he thought he could transgress it with impunity; on a case-by-case basis. He had thought his friend could be reasoned with, totally unaware that the ancient Scottish and southern law itself was making his friend move towards violence; that his friend was as subject to its dictates as Jeremy was to its results. Both men were officers of this natural court. Neither man had free will, the law acted on both perpetrator and victim; like two bodies in the Newtonian tableau .
Knowing, Isaiah now saw, that retributive violence in defense of honor is a natural law that Scottish southerners obey like one obeys the law of gravity would have made Jeremy less cavalier about breaking it; ostensibly like he would have never just stepped off the ledge of a 13-story building thinking -somehow- he’d be ok.
II. 2018 e.v.
Lee had not heard from his son in many weeks and it caused fear and from fear rose anger and from ang
er, the egg of apathy was released; this was the cycle on which his whole cosmos revolved and encircled and flowed. If one did not act on one’s anger, it cooled into state of not giving a shit. A man who cared acted like it, and thus put his anger out into the world. He shaped the world or he changed into -he became- a man who no longer cared. The universe has equations for all things. And no system remains homeostatic for long.
Lee was not a philosophical man, and his son’s incessant need to speak on matters in such a way was confusing to him. His son spoke in ways that men did not speak in his time and place, and the boy’s language and ideas -it seemed- were as if from some source, some place, or likely a time, he -the father- would never see. That the men of 2500 years ago did in fact speak in such ways as his son did was -in fact- unknown to the father who thought he was -himself- as ancient as things got. The old man had no history, he had come into the world without a father himself, and thus father-culture too was not seemingly there. Rootlessness was the new way of the world.
He was old now, but even as a young man he had acted, not thought, and all thinking had been merely strategy, not invested with poetry or homily like with this boy. He believed his scion spoke in riddles as if meant to confuse, in contradiction as if to hide what might be useful, in metaphor to sap the energies of the listener as he wrestled with each part of the analogy and where it linked up with the reality of life.
And he changed -the boy did- every season he changed in hue and temperature and at what point in the sky his sun and moon did set and rise. One could not ever locate him, locate his conscience or what he felt was duty or what was now beyond-the-pale. He spoke in shocking terms, said outrageous things, then recanted in three years or less. He lived as gypsy, joined weird cults, gave away all his possessions and encouraged his elders to do the same. Even his skin seemed to change each time they saw him. His teeth grew sharper or shorter from use; his hands shook slightly and scars appeared over the bones.
