RHODES: Your daughter, Judy, is right there with her. I can see them. They are kissing.

I used to suffer from world weariness, but the wall says that too was nothing. I cannot get away from you, though that’s the only thing I want from life, from the whole last ounce of the universe. You also want to get away, but like me, you can’t, and for the same reason. I am your wall, and you are my wall. And the game we tried during the war of mounting each other like dogs in severe heat has not yet been settled. ( p 46)

Perhaps it is 'the spirit' rather than 'the letter' of Antichrist that ought to be considered in forging a more humanistic ideology than those that are the most de rigueur today.

Let us have no more separation between what we really know (on the basis of science) and what we claim to know (on the basis of faith). In that way, we will be least like the Paul of the New Testament, making more out of a hallucination than his culturally informed empiricist training warranted.

An impediment to implementing that ideal as a practical reality on a large social scale remains, all the same. It's not just in our limited prowess in convincing people. There is more to it than that. My view is that we live in a culture -- this present day 20th century culture -- where we are not accustomed to knowing ourselves. Given that our age has embraced Kant's philosophical notion as a basis for avoidance of psychology (for we cannot know "the thing in itself", as postmodernist theorists are prone to teach us), and generally we are too busy to bother to know ourselves anyway, we have a problem. It is this: Since we are generally, as individuals, in no position to claim to know ourselves very much, we are also not in a very strong position to differentiate between what we really know and what we think we know. If we don't know who and what we are, as human beings, and as individuals, we might assume that we know all sorts of things (that we actually do not) since the limits of our knowledge are unknown to us.

This is why ancient peoples often mistook their dreams or hallucinations of some kind of reality. Our situation in the world today may not be so grave, in terms of the kinds of errors we might make in differentiating what is real from what is not real. We have access to all sorts of artefacts of the sciences and humanities, to help us along with this endeavour of knowing ourselves. Yet we are taught no psychological skills in schools these days, as teachers rely upon operant conditioning, dealing with the students at arms reach, which deprives them of the capacity for internal self-regulation, and in turn, deprives them of useful self-knowledge.

Due to the cultural conditioning we experience within contemporary society, so many of us assume that self-knowledge is either not desirable or not possible. In workplaces today, "emotionalism" is eschewed. Yet it is common to label anything that one doesn't like or understand as the "emotionalism" of the other person. That which one dislikes, one tries to get rid of, by labeling it thus. The approach of labeling as "emotional" that which one has simply failed to understand (due to lack of adequate training and capacity for reflection) is a moral blight on society today. The cultural enforcement of rigid social conformity (on the basis of psychological blackmail, that not to conform implies an out-of-place emotionalism), is founded on a lack of personal insight into oneself and others. Who are those who suffer from the hallucinations that are projected onto them -- if now those "cultural others": women, blacks, and those of another cultural origin. We claim to know them, when we emotionally resort to labeling them, but what we know is often only a figment of the imagination, a projection of the parts we dislike about ourselves. As a society, we have been sucked into a social mire,which does not differ, as much as we would like to think it does, from a more antiquated and benighted religious consciousness. We think we know the other type of person, but we betray that claim to knowledge when we do not use reason and attempt to investigate the nature of the psychology of the person whom we see as being different from us. Rather, we merely project something onto them, so that we become reason itself -- and they become the disliked parts of our mentality (our unreason).

The spirit of Nietzsche's Antichrist is heard in the demand that societies and individuals engage in the project of enhancing self-knowledge.

I haven't had the killer instinct of late, since dealing with the finishing of my autobiography has been rather a masochistic project. It's like Marechera holding the bare threads of his words in his fingers and despondently proclaiming:


"Look what I have left of it: my life!"

There is much in this new version of the writing that I had been unwilling to face so directly, before -- so much that doesn't meet with higher standards for human experience, in a way that would give expression to some sense of human purity or transcendence of life such as it was and is. It's hard to express this sense of life's almost totalizing contingency that had me in its grips during the first part of my life -- and which set into place the chain of cause and effect relationships that has effected me until I was 40. There can be moral choices only when there is first knowledge, and secondly various options in place, apart from just one. These options are made accessible by predominating social values and by law. The Australian law that broke the very negative chain of cause and effect for me was that of the rights of a citizen to claim welfare payments. It was this that got me out of a situation of workplace abuse and home place dysfunction, without which, I would not be alive today.

So now I have knowledge, and despite the sometimes prejudicial or discriminatory attitudes that persist in society, against migrants, and against women, I am learning to recognise, once more, that I have freedom.

The best I can do is to share this freedom of mine, for however long it lasts. I know too well what it is like to have few clear or apparent options. My gifts are of a minor variety-- and this is what I get back:


"You are a friend in need and indeed.I just don't know how to thank youenough.Had it not been for you we would be six feet under the ground ."

It is not impossible to imagine that this state of violence is true in present day Zimbabwe.

I am inclined to feel very much that only those who have lived through some extremes can imagine what it is like to try to survive the extremes.

"Here's to wishing yu a happy 2009.We have been weighed and found worthy to enter this blessed year."

I now accept that I must handicap myself in relation to conservatives. When they are talking to me, they are not actually addressing me by any means:  they are addressing the 12 year old (the one I used to be).  Conservatives worship innocence, but hate adult women, who are defined for them in terms of a dangerous sexuality.  They are intent on turning adult women back into children.

It makes sense that they should panic, believing something nefarious is taking place, when an adult woman introduces a certain amount of irony into  a conversation with a conservative misogynist, as if one were to say:

"Hey I'm not a 12-year-old any more. LOOK. I am over here. And just begin to pay attention!"

To the conservative, for whom the twelve year old is all there is, this is like the twelve year old going nuts, going hysterical, showing a mean side. They want the old image back -- the twelve year old who simply listens to what she is told, with measured enthusiasm.

They don't want the twelve year old that is going nuts. They don't even want the 13-year-old. They demand that reality adapt to conform to their terms. It upsets them deeply when they cannot see what they expect to see, or  that their hallucinations about the world and who is in it are put to question.

Nietzsche understood correctly that so much of the mass indoctrination into modes of morality is about moving the swamps. In making this judgement, Nietzsche was drawing on his understanding of mass psychology -- that the masses regularly feel a need to release the tensions that come from being squeezed together into a massive conglomeration of human feelings, needs and desires. When the tension starts to build because of the pressures exerted on individual minds in relation to the cause of becoming massively ONE (one state, one national identity, one Führer), another force starts to demand its recompense. It achieves the alleviation of tension through blaming others. "Since I have had to sacrifice so much, in order to become one in mind and heart and soul with my community, others who seem different from me and who may not have suffered as I have, will now also have to suffer."

Thus the nature of so much of mass morality is to reward oneself for all of the efforts of delayed gratification by going on a psychologically bloodthirsty rampage against outsiders -- those whom, presumably, have not conformed to the programme quite as well as Thou.

Or maybe the masses vote out one governmental party and put another into power to express their moral indignation.

In my view, the key characteristic of  someone who is NOT being bourgeois is the ability to be at odds with oneself, or in opposition to oneself. What this implies is that one part of the self is capable opposing another part. Despite proclamations by postmodernists that capitalism has taken all the fun and wind out of transgression, I maintain that there is an overabundance of possible situations in which one can find something within oneself to oppose.

Without such a characteristic of being capable of opposing oneself, a person simply isn't all that interesting. Lack of self-opposition leads to being dependent on others to judge one fairly. Yet this is an ultimate form of moral abnegation. To be judged by others but never really by oneself means that one travels through life without self-awareness, never really mastering on a deep level one's own ideas, feeling for directions or goals.

To be self-consciously at odds with oneself is much more interesting and allows character to form.   For instance, one may have a goal to move from one state of being into another.  Unfortunately, in the eyes of  bourgeois individuals, the primary 'things in themselves', (that is, they themselves), are deeply and interminably unknowable.