Violence

[altered]

Some things are things no one deserves to go through.

A relatively new friend of mine opened up tonight about possibly the most horrific case of abuse I have ever heard of happening to someone I personally knew. I've been through some shit. My friends have been through some shit. It does not compare. The derangement of someone who would do what was described to me is beyond belief, and it is only because this man did not technically break any laws that he will not wind up in prison. Which isn't fucking fair when innocent people go to jail for smoking a fucking joint.

What happened is not my story to tell. She entrusted it to me and I will not violate that trust. But the violence she endured, despite not having a fucking mark on her, is inhuman. I am a connoisseur of the terrible, and it shocked me. I grew up reading Les Chants de Maldoror and watching Alien, and I think a book written about this fucking madness, a movie made of someone doing this, would make de Sade or Cronenberg say "whoa, that's too fucking far".



Some people lose their access to membership in humanity and the consideration due a human being, in my mind.

It's a bad thought to have. One of my core foundational beliefs is that people fucking matter. They are important. You keep them in mind when you perform an act. You do something to help as many people as you possibly can. But I can't shake it: some people deserve none of that. Through their actions, their words, their beliefs, they have looked at the concept of the Golden Rule, and they have deemed it "nah, I'm good."

I should be able to muster up some kind of sympathy, but I just mutter imprecations, incantations, and promises of violence. My hatred for their actions overrides their personhood. They become meat to me, and meat is made to be cut, beaten, and burned. And despite feeling the dissonance between these attributes of myself, I feel that this is correct and just. I do not regret these feelings. I don't consider them unhealthy. I treat them as a mark of personal excellence. "No matter how bad I think I am, I know I am better than this. I know this person will always be beneath me."



I am a gleaming, biomechanical skull grinning in the dying light of a black hole's accretion disc.

A second effect of these people's actions and my inherent feeling that people matter is that as I am exposed to terrible people, I remove my self-concept and identity further and further from humanity. I respect its institutions and social technologies less and less. I grow distant. I willingly pass into exile.

A part of my monstrous identity, it is true, is a reaction to being told that I am subhuman by those who would see me killed. "Is that so? As you wish. You will regret this choice." But a part of it is maintaining an ontological distance from people whose actions I find inconceivable. It offends me that I share a category with them at all. And I reframe my identity as a grim reflection of them. They are outwardly human, inwardly rotten -- I am slithering in the marshes with noisome, boneless limbs but I have a human heart to pump the syrupy black ichor in my arteries. A human mind, which for all its faults, loves and cares for and intends to protect people.

And looking over all of this, in a way, their violence to others cuts me too.



There are only endings.

I wish death on terrible people, and I do not feel bad. I harm them as much as I can within the boundaries of the law, and I sleep peacefully. Justice is not real. It's a fantasy. Abusers and manipulators and godless fucking architects of pain dwell at every elevation and find a way to destroy innocent people. No matter their station, the majority of them will never see comeuppance or repayment of any form, let alone enough to balance those fucking scales. Justice is a fucking joke. What I do isn't about justice. It's about violence.

I am a violent person. Not a dangerous person, but a violent one -- the distinction is important. I analyze my enemy and I hit them where they'll feel it. I create suffering. I do it on purpose. I do it exceedingly well. But my harm is self-limiting: the door is always unlocked, if they but try the knob. And my harm is reflexive: I escalate fast, but there is always cause and effect. And I am a violent person because all around me are violent people, doing violence to me and the people I love. The only ways to survive when weapons are trained on you is to be too scary to fuck with or to do unto them first.

What I do is about violence, because it's the only way I can keep my loved ones safe. It's the path of least total harm: to maximize the harm to specific targets in short bursts. Justice is, it is true, fake. But violence, in its infinite forms, is so very real.

This vile, small, unworthy man and his unspeakable actions reminded me tonight just how violent I really am.

[Doktor Howl]

 

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