The Desk.

I said I'd write my commandments next, but I'm going to continue with the deadly sins instead because I have them ready. These are somewhat responsive and parallel to the Abrahamic sins in the sense that they are not particular acts such as murder or theft, but rather patterns of behavior and character. However, I make no particular attempt to react to or oppose any given items in that collection; these are parallel in form, but independent in content. Each sin is accompanied by an equal and opposite virtue.

1. Humility. It follows that if pride is a central tennant of the philosophy, then its antithesis would be a sin. Humility, while respectable in moderation in certain situations, keeps those in its yoke from spreading their light to the world. I've known too many skilled and brilliant people too humble to realize and capitalize on their potential to put any stock in this so-called virtue. The true virtue that balances the sin of humility is the virtue of pride.

2. Pity. I have discussed at length the sinful nature of pity, so I will not go into great detail here except to say that it tears down every pillar upon which this philosophy is built. It shows a lack of respect for yourself and the person you pity. It creates lower standards and removes the incentive for the truly powerful, better people from getting what they deserve over the merely pitiful people. The virtue that balances the sin of pity is the virtue of respect.

3. Regret. It is a sin and a crime against against yourself and nature to feel regret. I have written much on the topic of living deliberately because living consciously and purposefully is the only way to truly live. Regret implies that you have not lived deliberately, that you have become a product of your circumstances and failed to make deliberate decisions. Worse than personal regret is regret towards that over which you have no control. If you did not purposefully create your situation, then you don't have any business or the right to lament it, and if you did create it, then you must also have consciously accepted all possible consequences of your actions. Regret is the product of instability, ignorance, and the desire to ignore the problems in your past. The virtue that balances the sin of regret is the virtue of deliberateness (consciousness).

4. Circumlocution. Choose the words that mean what you intend to say and only those words. Brevity is a powerful means for expression of passion reserved for those without regard for the inaccuracy of absolutes. Reservation and deliberate speech will make your words infinitely more powerful and passionate than the babblings of people who never shut up. The virtue that balances the sin of circumlocution is the virtue of reticence.


I might actually get to those commandments soon. I was joking when I finished the last post, but I'm starting to like this little jaunt. Stay tuned.

I've been poking for a while at a three-pillar foundation on which I appear to base my life. You've heard me say these words before, mostly because I like them and they start with the same letter, but a careful dissection of these pillars will reveal quite a thorough analysis of the human experience.

Pillar 1: Power. Society is just a complex network of relationships, and those relationships are based power structures. Power in this context means authority, and is a simple enough concept to grasp. Power of authority is manifest in any historically legitimized form of political or corporate title. The other context of power is ability. This is the unwritten but very real sort of power that goes into constructing the more visible power of authority. This power is most easily recognized as a given individual's ability to excell in a given field. The people who are best at what they do, if what they do is something other people need, will have more power. This is most visible in terms of the economy and capitalism, but natural or learned talents in any athletic, academic, or artistic field will translate into some degree of power in society. And to some extent, whether we want to admit it or not, other factors besides legitimate skill can give power. Theft and exploitation, for example, are not legitimate ways of life, but if one is good enough, has enough power, he can lead a perfectly successful life, and the end will justify the means. Physical appearance, too, can contain quailities including attractiveness or intimidation, which can influence the person's unspoken power status, and the way the person is treated by others. The "power of ability" that I talk about is a sort of "social capital," which is used to purchase "power of authority."

Pillar 2: Pride. In my economy of power model, pride is absolutely necessary. Not only is personal confidence a socially attractive quality that can provide power, but it is the cornerstone of both self-reliance and capitalism. Your ability to succeed relies on your willingness to spend your social capital. Being born the best can only get you so far if you don't do something with it. The economy becomes stagnant if the rich just keep accumulating money without spending any, and it's the same in my model. The people with the power have to know they have it, and know how to use it. You can't feel sorry for anybody. It's a fact of capitalism (pure capitalism - don't give me your liberal communist bullshit about how life's not fair because of course it's not, that's my point) that people get what they earn, so sympathy weakens the system. Pride is what has made Western society great, and it's humility and piety that have made the East a laughing stock. Pride builds great architecture and monuments ever since Pharoah called himself God; pride creates great art because real artists aren't afraid of anybody; pride pushed us out of Christendom and into the Age of Reason because Humanism gave us the balls to practice science. Hubris is progress, and pride is power.

Pillar 3: Passion. This one is somewhat unrelated to my power model, and is pretty much as personal note. Passion is the essence of the human experience. It is what drives us through our lives, and the thing for which we spend our whole lives striving. Because of that, it becomes a source of power. Passion is what inspires a man to train, to study, to gain the skills and talents not born to him. He increases his social capital because he has the passion to devote himself to a pursuit. And sometimes, power comes from the passion itself. Passionate people can move the hearts of men more deeply than all the skill and eloquence of the next man, and that gives them power more than his ability. But more than anything, passion is a way of life. To truly live, to live deliberately, making deliberate choices and accepting their consequences, is a function of passion.

There you have it. Power, Pride, Passion. The three pillars of Watsonism. Stay tuned next week for my six commandments. And later this season: the four deadly sins and the five-fold path.

The Truth? You can't handle the Truth. We live in a world where good and evil are perceived relatively, and that perception has to be held up by scapegoats. Who's going to do it? You? You, little miss Christian? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for the ones in my wake and you curse my methods. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That the fate of my victims, while tragic, is for the common good. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, is for the common good. You don't want the truth. Because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me here, you need me here. I use words like pride, power, passion. I use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a girl who rises and sleeps under the blanket of righteousness that I provide and questions the manner in which I provide it. I'd rather you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise I suggest you pick up your slack and see what it's like to be hated. Either way I don't give a damn what you think you're entitled to.


Five points if you know what I just parodied. Ten points if you know what I'm talking about. Twenty points if you can figure out my 8-28 post, cause nobody has yet.

There is too much focus in the academic community on national histories. Look at the curricula vitae of the professors, as well as the classes offered, in the history department of any university and you will see that their areas of focus are devided by the subject of nationality. This approach to the study of history is fundamentally flawed in a number of ways, and has consequences which reach further than a simple mistake in the distribution of information. The most obvious flaw is that the world was not always constructed in terms of what we know today to be nations. In fact it has only been within the last four hundred years that the modern nation-state began to take shape as a prominent feature of world politics. So does studying French history imply the study of the nation called France, or does it include the history of that geographic area from the onset of human habitation? I would hardly call Gauls Frenchmen, and the region has been through so many changes in affiliation since antiquity that at any one period of time it housed French-speaking people who held quite different opinions about what it meant to be French. And the same is true of any territory which we today consider a sovereign nation. But that problem is merely in the classification - the history itself is the same regardless of whether it is studied by someone whose focus is in French history or English or whatever else.

So why distinguish academic departments in this manner? Because the alternative, while more academically honest and accurate, is far too broad. The alternative of which I speak, and of which I am a bigger fan than of national history, is thematic history. To focus not on the history of France or England, but the history of technology, of the military, of religion, of economics. It is these sweeping themes which in encompass and direct the politics of any and all nations, and a full understanding of the history of a nation cannot come without taking a look at how these forces work. National history tells a story, but the theme always outweighs the plot. Not only that, but you can never understand what went on in France without looking at contemporary Germany or Spain. The French Revolution, for example, didn't just happen and now we have to talk about it because we're studying France; no, it happened because of the forces at work all over Europe. Regardless of the time period, though, international technology, religion, and trade, were always broader and more significant than any one of the groups of people involved.

For a thousand years, Christendom and the papacy governed the kings as well as the peasants of Medieval Europe. I could go on all night with examples from the cultural and intellectual revivals during the Renaissance, or the religious Reformation of the sixteenth century, or the Atlantic World System of the seventeenth, or the liberalism movement of the eighteenth, or industrialization and imperialism in the nineteenth, or take your choice of technological, military, economic, or social movements that wrote the histories of the entire world at any time.

The reason I bring this up is that I had a delightful conversation with Prof. Townend yesterday and it made me feel important to bring something up that sounded important, and he happened to agree with me. His resume will say that he is a historian of Early Modern Brittain and Ireland, but he will tell you he is a social historian, which means his primary focus is on the everyday lives of individuals at that time in those places, rather than political movements or military or whatever. He is especially knowledgeable about the shift to the Atlantic World System during the seventeenth century, and the economic impact it had on ordinary Irish and British people. Anyway, he agreed with my point that themes such as trade, especially in his feild, are more important than nationality because they transcend national borders. His response to my argument was that thematic approaches, even when limited to be time-frame specific (which national approaches are as well), would still be too broad to effectively research and write about. And besides that, the academic community is too deeply rooted in its approach that it would be impossible to take any other that did not easily fit into the paradigm. All the academic sources and documents to be found are written and catagorized to fit this mold because the researchers doing the writing, as well as the librarians doing the catagorizing, are themselves trained in a national approach of whatever nation and period, and they expect their audience to have a similar academic background. This is the biggest problem. It's easy to contemplate on the influence and patterns of broad themes, but it's an entirely different matter to do research and write concisely in such a vein. Townend equated it to the difference between being served a nice meal in a restaurant and going back in the kitchen to make it.

Interdependence is a bitch. A thousand years ago, people in South Eastern North Carolina wouldn't even know about a hurricane in the gulf, let alone be affected by it in a significant way. What people don't seem to realize is that this is not just a matter of higher gas prices. And it's not temporary. The problem is that just isn't enough gas at all. And without gas, our whole civilization while come to a screeching halt. This construction all over campus will have to stop or be slowed dramatically in the next few days. Because that's how much gas it takes just to turn those machines on. All these dozens of people the state has hired for these jobs here will be out of work again, and this construction was supposed to be the spearhead of a major initiative to employ our region's residents. And the same is true of anybody using gas-guzzling machines like that. Another example: a girl I know just got a job twenty miles away in Fort Fisher on the weekends. It's likely that she'll have to quit because of the gas crisis. But enough about microsystems. People all over the South East commute significant mileage every day. If there's not enough gas, these people have to totally alter their transportation. Even carpooling and public transportation aren't solutions. It's not an issue of paying higher prices for gas, if it was, then the problem would be as simple as inflation. And what about the police patrol cars on the streets all day every day? Will they get first priority on filling up? Tractor trailors are already being sidelined, which means no shipments. Food, clothing, manufactured goods, appliances, batteries, whatever - done, gone. That means the prices of all those things sky-rocket, too. Inflation like you wouldn't believe is about to hit. And the pipeline wasn't the only thing that hurricane took out. There's no electricity in half of Mississippi. And not just residentially. People can't go to work, to school, to the grocery store, because those places are in the dark, too. People are getting shot over ice cubes. The bayou is closed. The rest of the developed world is about to close with it.