By Tiresias
Once there was a man who had two sons: a legitimate child and a bastard. The father loved the son of his marriage and hated the child of his infidelity. His love and coldness were equally selfish:
He loved the elder son because in him he saw an image of all he admired about himself. He hated the younger because, in him, he saw all the parts of himself of which he was most ashamed. One was like the father’s image, the other was like his shadow. One was like his conscious, the other was like his unconscious. Etc.
Because of their father’s selfishness, God laid a curse on the family, a curse on each brother.
The elder brother’s curse was that, while he lived, he would never see heaven.
The younger brother’s curse was that he would catch a glimpse of it while on this earth.
Conversely, one could say that the elder brother’s curse was that he had seen the earth too clearly, to the point where he had become preoccupied with it, to the exclusion of all heavenly things. And the younger brother’s curse was that he would never really see the earth. The brightness of heaven’s image in his mind would outshine all else. Like the vision of St. Paul on the road to Damascus, the light had blinded him. But the blindness did not dissipate…
Or if you prefer to put it in a more familiar way: the elder brother’s great gifts led him to become obsessed with what he could control and understand, to the exclusion of all true transcendence. Earthly and visible things had filled his soul to the point where, in a rather shallow way, he was quite content. He lived as if there was no heaven. In his heart, he thought he didn’t need it.
The younger brother’s curse, on the other hand, was that his glimpse of heaven led him ever further from the earth, from everyday life, from all those fundamental things which he had scarcely even begun to get a handle on. So the testimony he tried to give to others of what he had seen was quite unconvincing, marred and obscured by his stupidity and his clumsy, ugly manner of speaking, just as his general credibility was injured by his obvious lack of virtue.
Or to put it again in more familiar terms: He was a sloppy, lazy, stupid, selfish, arrogant, cruel, simplistic idiot. In a word, he was a loser.
Moreover he was, in fact, absurdly credulous. The fact that this incident (seeing heaven) had actually happened was no help when he tried to express it to those few people who would listen. The true light he really had seen simply became lost in the shuffle of all the lies he didn’t have enough good sense or intelligence to doubt.
Even before the curse had descended on both brothers (that is to say, before the younger brother saw a glimpse of heaven), the two were divided in curious, paradoxical ways.
This division was most obvious in their beliefs. As I said, the younger brother was a loser. That was the most obvious thing about him. Perhaps, in his day to day life, he was able to fool himself—but in his heart, he knew it was the truth.
Yet this loser—really, this loser’s loser—was the most stalwart champion of aristocracy, monarchy, hierarchy, authority. He idolized those who were most unlike him (celebrities, billionaires, great poets and scientists, etc.) and believed that the poor and stupid deserved their poverty and misery, although he himself was close to being one of the poorest and stupidest people, as well as the one who had been on the receiving end of a great deal of injustice.
It would have been quite rational for him to have become a “leftist,” that is, to complain loudly that he had been ill-treated, that he had been made into a victim, that he had never tasted the sweeter things in life and it was high time he got what was coming to him. This demand for justice would have been quite justified, and its complaints would have been true.
But for some mysterious reason, he believed in everything which went against his own best interests.
A similar paradox expressed itself in the beliefs the firstborn son, the aristocrat. That was a good name for him. Although he behaved with a certain unspoken noblesse oblige towards the world’s losers, there was no doubt in his heart (or really, in anybody else’s) that he was their permanent objective superior. He made up for his own greatness in a laudable way, by descending like an angel to lift their burdens, by treating them all as if they were the same caliber of creature that he was. This just went to show that, alongside all his other virtues, he had been gifted with a great magnanimity.
And the same curious inversion obtained in this brother’s beliefs as well. Just as the loser believed in something approaching classical feudalism, this brother, the aristocrat—who was probably one of the most naturally talented and “privileged” persons on the planet—was diehard believer in absolute unrestrained democracy and complete equality, in always seconding the inferior, the subaltern, the little guy.
There was something strangely noble about the younger brother’s acceptance—really, his demand to be saddled by the yoke of authority. Buried in it was a call for his father to love him, to understand him, to at least acknowledge him. Yet his violent mistreatment of his fellow losers was shameful & lacking in compassion.
In the same way, there was something lofty about how the aristocrat was the constant champion of the marginalized and oppressed. It was faintly redolent of Jesus Christ. Yet far more redolent of Satan was his demoniacal hatred for all truth, beauty, goodness, and power.
For the firstborn’s fierce love of everything inferior was nothing compared to his violent hatred for all authority, all structure, all meaning. He considered all such things intolerably oppressive, as oppressive as his father’s suffocating love. He hated fathers and if it were possible he would create a world without them, where the name had been stripped of all meaning. The more the world gave him, the more it loved him, the more he despised it.
For anyone who had eyes to see, each brother was his own ridiculous spectacle. The younger living on food stamps, dressed in ratty, torn, unfashionable clothes, bloviating about aesthetic greatness (while he himself had extremely poor taste and surrounded himself with tacky kitsch without a shadow of irony), the superiority of his civilization (of which he was the shameful refuse, if he could even be called its participant—his mother was a foreigner), the evils of statism (though the state was his main means of support), and the greatness of the monarchy—the divine right of kings in particular.
Yet the other brother, the diehard egalitarian, virtually enjoyed the divine right of kings de facto, if not de jure — I mean that he was one of those jet-setting socialite millionaires who do nothing but travel the world uninterruptedly, doing whatever they want. Actually, history’s most outrageous sybarites would have envied this one’s freedom, and, most likely, his supreme self control. I mean that even in his own heart he was free.
In the matter of actual virtue, tragedy and comedy both coincided at infinity, like lines of perspective on the horizon. The elder brother believed that it was enough to do whatever one pleased. There was no such thing as laziness, only a lack of motivation, a lack of authenticity. By a similar token, there was no such thing as malice—at best, there were just misunderstandings, most of which could be fixed by therapy. These absurd beliefs were belied by his actual behavior. No one was pushed himself harder, no one was more scrupulous down to the littlest acts of virtue, no one was more moralistic! It was as if he was only able to hold these extremely absurd beliefs because the comparatively boring truth had been drilled so deeply into him, it was such a part of his nature, that he had forgotten that it was, in fact, true.
The younger brother, on the other hand, consciously subscribed to the classical theory of virtue (that is, to the truth). He was extremely quick to tell anyone who would listen that only extremely strict and constant discipline could suffice to begin to beat a man into shape. Yet it was alarmingly obvious to everyone who encountered him that he was barely able or willing to climb to the lowest rungs of the ladder of virtue. For the loser, true virtue was such an alien thing, both to his nature and his own experience, that he almost felt it was enough to extol it from a certain distance, in the abstract — like a butterfly in a glass case.
Each acted as if he believed what the other espoused, and each espoused what would have been in line with how the other acted. Each one’s behaviors expressed the opposite of what they believed!
The degree to which this same law of paradox extended into every single part of their lives was utterly baffling.
With respect to race, for example: the younger brother’s behaviors were extremely problematic, extremely insensitive and hurtful, certainly to the point of culpability. He uttered casual slurs, laughed at offensive jokes, even let himself be carried along with whatever despot was trying to rouse up the common people into some politically expedient hatred (although this was usually more a function of his credulity than his malice).
He would spend hours on social media uttering shameful, stupid innuendo about anyone who didn’t share his particular phenotype.
Yet he himself was at least half-descended from one of the groups which he railed against, and his wife would not even have entered the country if not for a policy which he opposed on principle. And whether due to some inner warmness or simple cowardice, his fixation did not translate into any animus in real life. Rather, his shameful screeds passed by, like everything else in his life, under a haze of thoughtless hypocrisy. Half the time, his complaints were strangely motived by a spirit of equality in the same way that half of the aristocrat’s mercies were motivated by a spirit of patronizing superiority. Blind to the history of oppression and its continuing burden, he naively saw the other races as the same as himself in almost every respect, and simply believed that they should put a little more willpower into improving their lot. Was he right or wrong? Human beings are neither wholly free nor wholly determined by their circumstances. Yet his willful refusal to acknowledge any influence of circumstance on behavior was wrong, just as the aristocrat’s insistence that all differences in station were always entirely attributable to oppression robbed the oppressed of their agency — and thus, their dignity.
People from these subaltern groups were certainly far more similar to the loser than they were to the aristocrat, and the loser had far more in common with them than with the more privileged identity groups which he vainly tried to lay claim to.
The aristocrat was extremely (and rightly) opposed to the hideous evil of racism. But as in other things he did, there was always something vaguely patronizing about his work for the cause. It was as if he had taken it upon himself to personally save the lesser races—whom he seemed to believe were too stupid and weak to do it themselves—and even if he did not actually leap into the fray himself, he insistently and chauvinistically controlled the entire conversation.
The aristocrat’s friends from other races were so perfectly assimilated that the loser was, in truth, more connected to his roots than they were. He at least retained some irrational particular customs—the aristocrat’s friends had none. They were in virtually every respect colorless, cultureless, interchangeable cosmopolitans. They could almost be called raceless, if not for the insistent attacks from people like the loser (who, as usual, misunderstood everything).
To give just one example: One of the aristocrat’s close friends was a prominent politician whose parents had emigrated from a poor, “subaltern” country (that is, one which in recent history had been terribly ill-treated by various wealthier nations). The politician had only immigrated a generation or two ago, yet a combination of honest hard work and natural talents meant that they were already extremely well assimilated. They were so well-assimilated, in fact, that they had absorbed some of the aristocratic spirit of sedition — the hatred of order, of structure, of tradition, of fathers. This is why they were such close friends with the aristocrat. In their speeches they complained about the most fundamental pillars of the society they lived in, demanding each one be torn down and replaced with something more idealistic, more pure, more all-encompassing. Their ideal country would be an utterly technocratic world-state with no culture, no customs, and (incidentally) no religion. Their great natural gifts and hard work had led them into the same blindness to transcendence as all aristocrats, to the insipid (and arrogant) belief that paradise can be created on this earth — here and now.
But the loser, true to his (often malicious) ignorance, confused an excess of universality with an extremity of particularity. In a masterstroke of immense stupidity, he confused the politician (who had attained an advanced degree at the most prestigious educational institution in their extremely wealthy country) for an enemy agent of some nearly-illiterate theocratic tribal bands who were active, not even in the politician’s country of origin, but a country several thousand miles away. It was the logic of Hollywood, at best.
Consider for a moment, the stupidity, the malice it takes to confuse a secular, highly-educated, progressive wealthy cosmopolitan operating at the highest level of international politics with a theocratic, illiterate, hyper-reactionary tribal goat-herd — simply on the basis of their appearance. One must be either willfully blind to everything but what is most superficial, or positively driven to divide and alienate people for innocent, meaningless differences.
Yet consider also, by a similar token, how misguided it would be for the politician to feel any solidarity with their blood relative, when the goat-herd would get along much better with the loser. At least the two would share some belief in God!
The brothers’ polarity extended to matters of sex as well.
The elder brother was a staunch feminist. In his spare time he wrote articles for a mildly successful online periodical on the subject. But he was also emotionally abusive in such an exceedingly subtle way that it was in some senses more insidious, more harmful (certainly more difficult to report to the police), and his contempt for the concept of chivalry, among other things, meant that he wasn’t above pressuring women into giving him what he wanted. He paid great lip service to the idea of giving women an equal democratic say in all decisions, but in his own household, he stuck to the resolutions to which he first adhered, heedless of his wife’s dissent. In his heart he knew that he was quite attractive to the opposite sex, and that if this relationship deteriorated, he could simply find another.
The younger brother, by contrast, was repulsive to almost all women. His own wife had married him, in part, to attain permanent residency in their country. Yet he played a Lothario, affecting a cartoonish contempt for women in order to drown out his fundamental insecurity and fear of them. He operated a much less successful pick-up artist blog where he lionized and inflated the patriarchy and praised men as being more rational and generally superior. Yet his wife, who unlike her husband possessed at least a small measure of good sense (and was, in fact, his clear superior), made all important decisions in their household.
Although he had always been quite irreligious in a matter-of-fact way, the elder brother had a kind of flaming faith in his false causes, almost to the extent of martyrdom. Even though he did not believe in the truth, he paid tithes at the local temple and even participated in services there from time to time. He didn’t do any of this because he actually believed, but simply because he had been brought up well — for him, it was a matter of custom, an almost effortless habit.
The younger brother, on the other hand, actually believed in the truth (in a word, he believed in God and in the revelations which He has given to mankind), but in a very curious way, in his nature, he was more atheistic than his elder brother. I mean that nothing was more natural for him to act as if God did not exist, and it was an exhausting struggle for him to keep whipping himself into making at least the most perfunctory acts of worship.
The older brother, the atheist, had all the devotion of a saint—but he wasted it on false causes. The loser’s comparatively paltry belief in the truth was overwhelmed by his elder brother’s incandescent zeal for malignant lies.
The two were not unlike Simon Peter and Simon Magus. I mean that the former confessed the truth, yet he was rather timid about it. He would probably have denied Christ to the little maid, even under less strenuous circumstances. Whereas the other believed in nothing but the devil’s lies, so to speak—and did so boldly, fearlessly, shamelessly, with a ferocious, incandescent zeal.
No one was less given to belief than the loser, because everything else in his nature was so fundamentally disordered. Yet he did believe, as if in order to make up for the general deficit. His older brother, again, was his opposite. Everything functioned so well in him that he did not perceive the vacuity in his own nature.
In many, many ways, the two were both hypocrites. Instead of calling them the aristocrat and the loser (which seems to frame things in the elder brother’s favor), you could call them “the spoiled child” and “the poor man.”
And God seems to favor the poor—as someone once said: they may be poor, but they are always rich in faith. So, as I said: one day, as if to console him for his miserable, unhappy life, God gave the lesser brother a glimpse of heaven.
And this vision truly changed him. He was constantly acting as if the world was paradise or could almost become it at any instant. He could not help applying the laws of paradise to the world which could never accept or understand them.
But wasn’t this the politician’s problem, too? Utopian idealism? Well, in fact, although there are similarities between the aristocrat’s and the loser’s view, in essence they are opposites. The utopia of the aristocrats actually represents an immense compromise, a compromise which has run so deep that it no longer even recognizes itself to be a compromise at all. The utopia of the losers, on the other hand, is a childish refusal to compromise, a refusal so immense that it fails to see that it is a refusal.
The loser could not budge an inch on the most childish idealism. He seemed to live on the level of childhood, believing that every virgin impulse was trustworthy, every story was true — and the more beautiful the story, the more true it had to be! He was truly, dangerously naïve. Constantly deceived by evil, unscrupulous men, who squeezed what little he had out of him. His watchword, his motto was that “All is true.”
The elder brother knew that the opposite was the case. Virtually nothing was true. First instincts, like the first of anything, could never be trusted. And as for stories — all stories were false, and the more beautiful the story, the more false and harmful it was.
In fact, it was almost as if the uglier a story was, the more true it was likely to be. The elder brother believed that the deepest level of nature was conflict, that there was nothing underlying the visible world but the struggle between vicious animals and evil impulses competing for money, power, and the fulfillment of their mindless animal lusts. Nothing but cruel domination and force.
Yet his younger brother—who had experienced far more exploitation, conflict, and the fire of animalistic passions than the elder brother ever would—again, believed against his own best interests. He believed that the world was fundamentally fair, that a man was responsible for his condition.
The younger brother lived in the midst of a deafening racket in the poorest part of town—but with eyes glassy with the glimpse of heaven which he treasured, he could only describe it: “harmony”
The elder brother lived at peace, in a tranquil part of the world, but his eyes having never seen heaven, he could only sneer and say: “dissonance”
The brother who belonged everywhere and who was welcomed by everyone (strength and beauty are easy to love) pretended to be a rebel against everything, he who was friends with everybody pretended that the world was his enemy. He imagined that he loved the poor, but he hated no one as much as nearly the poorest man of them all, his own brother.
The brother who didn’t belong anywhere pretended he was secure and at home. Although he had never known a home. The one whom the world hated pretended that the world was his greatest friend. He imagined that the beautiful faces he saw on TV and in the movies would smile on him, when in truth they would sneer with contempt—and no one would bear as much contempt for him as his own elder brother.
And so on! I could go on forever, but you understand the idea. Is the younger brother innocent? By no means. He is cruel, thoughtless, vicious, inexcusably ignorant, the source of half the evil in the world. Perhaps he wins by a hair, simply because he is more stupid, and ignorance is less culpable than willful malice. God certainly seemed to think so.
You could almost call them the pharisee and the publican. Yet we must not forget that pharisees are some of the most pleasant, attractive, and charming people, and publicans are the most repugnant, obnoxious, and foul. And does this not extend to morality, as well? Virtually all the loser has to his name is that little candle of faith—not even natural virtue. The aristocrat, by contrast, has absolutely everything a person could ever want—even virtue—but not that candle. The lesson is that the former outweighs the latter. “For what shall it profit a man, if he gains the world, yet loses his soul?”
Is the elder brother simply contemptible, simply evil? We must not forget that every good thing human beings have created was made by men like him. All works of art, all the triumphs of technology and science, all the beautiful scintillating philosophies which captivate mens’ minds… well, actually, that is where it all starts to go wrong. One brother’s strength is his weakness, the other brother’s weakness is his strength. But we must not overlook that before it is weakness, strength is strength, and strength is good. And before it is a strength, weakness is weakness, and weakness is bad.
So what became of these two brothers? Needless to say, they were the bitterest of enemies. They were so different, it was as if they spoke different languages, as if they lived in different worlds. But they spoke the same language, lived in the same nation. More than that—they shared the same father.
Did they ever reconcile, or were they doomed to eternal separation?
It would only take one to reach out across the abyss which separates them and put an end to their division. Even if the other rejected the offer, something significant would have been accomplished. It takes two to fight, two to struggle, two to continue a cycle of hatred. That fire needs one to feed in kindling while the other fans the flames. It only takes one to stop, to reach out his hand, to call the other his brother.
But so far, that hasn’t happened. Maybe someday it will.
