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A Long-expected Parley
by Madison MacBear
[email protected]

Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

Re: "Like Herding Cats; Sinister Observations into Libertarian Snobbery" by Lucifer Geraldo in Issue 632

Ladies and Gentlemen, Sovereigns and Sentients! Please forgive this long-overdue rebuttal to Sov. Geraldo's post on Sex and Magick. I was engaged in furious cogitations as to the increase of my economic wherewithal. But now I have gained a breathing space, that I may answer Sov. Geraldo with the detail and respect he deserves.

First, on Magick. Sov. Geraldo informs us that he will bend every effort (excepting those dedicated to the United Overthrow of the current ruling elite, in favor of...whatever Sov. Geraldo may choose, his Plan, not mine) to work and sweat and strain and metabolize food into the energy needed to power his implacable mind and indomitable will, in order to gain many mighty Spiritual and Magickal powers, to reach a higher form of consciousness, and to ensure the persistence of his soul after death. I am a Christian. If you hadn't figured that out yet, you obviously spent too many years in State-run schools. To repeat, I. Am. A. Christian. You may all now boo and hiss at me.

But debates about Pastafarianism and/or Discordianism aside, I am a follower of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. This carries with it certain benefits. For instance, my life will be a lot easier than Sov. Geraldo's. Not that my Christian walk will automatically be a utopia; far from it. It will rather mark me out for "treatment" by the jackboots of the spiritual realm. No, I rather meant that while Sov. Geraldo works, and strains, and sweats, and metabolizes, I will receive all those spiritual (if not Magickal) powers automatically, upon my Ascension to a Higher Plane of Existence (death) beyond which my soul is guaranteed to survive. So while Sov. Geraldo spends all his time and energy aside from his martial excursions in pursuit of what is essentially my welcoming gift, I can spend my corresponding time, energy, and metabolism on racking up Treasure in Heaven, "where entropy doth not biodegrade, where the tax assessor doth not break in and steal." Know ye not I might judge angels? To Sov. Geraldo, I say, good luck, and happy striving. I prefer to take the less strenuous "fourth path." Our quibble is like that of the bestseller "Rich God, Poor God," wherein the Poor God saith, "Work hard, study hard, bend your indomitable will to the changing of the universe," and the Rich God saith, "Hitch your wagon to a star, then sit back and let Me do all the heavy lifting, while you concentrate on building your downline [for you see, we get referral bonuses for recruiting others to the Cause]." Christianity, for those who are too lazy to self-deify.

And now, about sex. I can do no better in my present circumstances, than to quote from the Great British Libertarian C.S. Lewis (circa 1942), quoting from Mere Christianity: "...[Y]ou and I, for the last twenty years, have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex. We have been told, till one is sick of hearing it, that sexual desire is in the same state as any of our other natural desires and that if only we abandon the silly old Victorian idea of hushing it up, everything in the garden will be lovely. It is not true. The moment you look at the facts, and away from the propaganda, you see that it is not. They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up. But for the last twenty years it has not been. It has been chattered about all day long. Yet it is still in a mess. If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it has not. I think it is the other way round. I think the human race originally hushed it up because it had become such a mess."

Lewis himself was no stranger to sex. At another place he wrote that off all the vices, he had never been tempted by gambling or homosexuality. When a reader wrote to ask him whether that meant he had been tempted by (even tried) all the others, he wrote back [more or less] "of course." In Surprised by Joy, the autobiography detailing his early life, there are strong indications of homosexual relationships among his fellow students at the boarding schools. Later, Lewis was a soldier, and still later he was a professor and taught university students. I daresay there wasn't much that was commonly known about sex (barring a few specialist fetishes perhaps) of which he was uninformed. And yet he writes that "[Chastity] is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong. One or the other. " He believed, of course, that it was the "modern" sexual instinct. IIRC, the talk ended with the theory that advertisers had been trying to keep men constantly obsessed with sex, "for a man with an obsession is a man with very low sales resistance." There you have it, Sovereigns--sex sells, and a constant jabber about sex serves as a convenient fnord.

Until next time, Ladies and Gentlemen, Sovereigns and Sentients,

Madison MacBear,

Somewhere in the Agora

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