On Kindness (Part 2, Chapters 6-9)

Language for Animals VOLUME ONE (The Eonothem.§.2.❡.2.8.) Section Two

6

Trickery & Metaphoric Nation-States

Some might consider that first harm, the trickery harm, to be a utilitarian construct: cruelty as a means to an end. This misunderstands both cruelty and trickery: trickery is enjoyable, done for its own sake. Its effect on you is of no consequence to me. This is the insidious brilliance of the tricking form of cruelty; it breeds kindness despite the fact that we don’t mean it to. 

But it gets more complicated than that. Imagine my interior as a small nation. The State of Kindness seeks to reach out to you, a neighboring nation, but knows that this neighboring nation is not receptive to kindness. So the State of Kindness asks the State of Deception to help. Now, the State of Deception cannot be talked to in a straightforward manner. The State of Kindness must find a few citizens of its own that happen to have been perhaps born in or have close ties with the State of Deception. Kindness must deceive Deception with expat citizens of Deception.¹ No. There are duel citizens, or citizens belonging to many and all countries.² 

The State of Kindness should not be thought of as a collection of different consciousnesses, nor should we think there a certain means-to-an-end game that the State of Kindness is employing against its own citizens. More accurately, there are citizens of Deception within Kindness, always, so that there is a part of Kindness that inherently enjoys the act of deceiving, and this joy in deception comes from a place of cruelty. Maybe there’s something Hegelian about this or maybe there is not. 

The Governors of Kindness do not have to “get” the small group of Deception expats to deceive the State of Deception. The State of Kindness wants to Deceive the State of Deception, and by happy coincidence, does so in a manner that elicits a kindness, the State of Deception reaching out to the neighboring nation of You, but being Deception (infused with Kindness) the State interacts with You via Deception, because that is its inherent nature. Luckily, this form of Deception (there are others) deceives the neighbor nation into Kindness.³ 

Does it always work out this cleanly? Probably not, and the analogy to international relations ultimately doesn’t make sense.⁴ Our interiority—or at least mine—is an anarchy (and not interior at all): there are no rulers and thus no nations or states. But this is well beyond the scope of this narrative. 

7

Deception & Literature

I sometimes worry I am a broken human but this is because I am not kind to myself. I don’t believe it is deception getting in the way, because that’s not how deception works. If anything, my cruelty of deception is not strong enough. This is not to say it isn’t still pretty strong: all art is deception, including literature, and I do write literatures, even if they are not read or enjoyed. My bitterness over this is the result of an unkindness to you for believing that what I have to give you is needed or wanted. You may not be ready for it. It may not be ready to share and so you wisely send it back so that I may hone it. You might be wrong; this might be exactly what you need and you send it back dumbly. It is a cruelty for me to not forgive you for this mistake. It is hubris to think it is always that last thing and never see that it is sometimes a wisdom to reject my kindness. Wisdom is a form of kindness, likely some balanced form with just enough deception and cruelty to keep things fun. It is hubris (a cruelty) to think one can ever know, or even that it matters. In knowing—through listening kindness—that we are all one, we see that we are not. There are differences. 

There are secrets.

8

Confusion

Part of you is secret from me. This is why I like secrets; the universe is inherently secretive. It would not be wrong to say that one’s path is designed for one based on what the universe needs in order to reveal itself, express itself, and bloom. In that sense, the universe, or god, is omnipotent, and we can thus speak of fate, or destiny.⁵ But it would be unwise (a hubris and a cruelty) to think we understand this well enough to know that we need not act, or that we must act a certain way. In other words, it is a hubris to think we are right about the universe, to think that the universe has secrets, to think that it blooms, or decide that it is a blooming thing with reproductive organs. The universe does have reproductive organs. The universe has all reproductive organs. We don’t know this for sure. 

Our moral confusion is part of the design. This makes things difficult.⁶ That difficulty is a reflection of the universe itself. Herself? I consider a feminine universe in order to reject a stereotypical patriarchal god, but now I must reject a stereotypical matriarchal universe too. The universe is all points between and beyond, all points contradictory and same. Nonetheless, that difficulty is a reflection of the universe in that the universe is a constantly unfolding consciousness all wound and bound together, unraveling and sometimes knotting together and bunching in parts only to later unravel there and tighten somewhere else. It is an infinite metamorphosis, a bloom that never finishes.⁷ Nonetheless nonetheless, we should not think that just because our lives are a requirement for the unfolding of the universe, that we have no will or are predestined to do this or that, thus absolving us of any moral code. There are an infinite amount of ways our lives could play out, and the universe needs all of them in order to bloom; we only get to experience one at a time (perhaps a few more than one if some kind of higher magical state is achieved, but that sort of thing is poppycock), and so we are bound to do so in the best way we can.⁸