Purity Rules for the New Millennium (Revisited)

For more than a decade, dating back to the mid-1990’s, when I used to leave a one-page, two-sided Xeroxed missive at coffeehouses and underground record stores around the Chicago area,the Asshole of the Century has been my face to the world. However, this asshole is undergoing a crisis of confidence.

Don’t get me wrong. With a couple of notable exceptions, I remain stubbornly proud of all my old screeds. But I’m beginning to think that it is the wrong time to be the Asshole of the Century. It has gotten to the point where every Tom, Dick, and Harry, from the web to the roadway, tends to act like an asshole. We live in a world of devolving behavior, where propriety and a concern for the feelings of others are so far away from a lot of people’s minds as to be in danger of becoming a quaint anachronism. Subtlety, common decency, humility, circumspection, all of these virtues seem to be in increasingly short supply these days. And perhaps only in their absence has it become clear how much we will miss them.

The Asshole of the Century was created at a time when our counterculture had kind of fallen asleep. I wanted to accost folks as they walked into their favorite coffeehouse. To wake them up. Piss them off. Make them think. Or at least make them shake their heads and chuckle.

As part of my current soul searching, I have decided to revisit the original pamphlet, entitled “Purity Rules for the New Millennium,” in which I attempted to lay out the core beliefs that would guide this asshole in my future writings. It’s strange how this old rant can now seem like it was written by an alien hand while simultaneously laying bare certain intractable elements of my self. Reading them today, I don’t know how many of these principles I still agree with. For one, I’ve either become a lot dumber or a lot less pretentious over the intervening decade, because it took me multiple readings to even make sense out of this list of imperatives, correlations, dichotomies, and “chimera”.

But here it is, the foundational text of the Asshole of the Century:

Given that our malaise stems from an absence of purpose, our motives need to become pure. Purity takes many forms. There is purity of action, purity of intent, and the purity of an idea. Purity can be achieved through either redemption, grace, or discipline. Given that the objective is witnessed through action and that the rational mind is incapable of redemption or grace, we need to focus our thoughts on the following disciplines:

THE PRIMARY IMPERATIVE:
Truth is light;
Mendacity is decay.
All human vice has its root in deceit.

THE SECONDARY IMPERATIVE:
Power is only legitimate as mutually recognized benevolence or as a means to suppress mendacity and its consequences.

THE TERTIARY CORRELATIONS:

Structure
Structure is the secret to both the mystical and the pragmatic. Even the most inspired of men must hang his hat on structure.

Progress
Without progress, mankind ceases to define himself. He becomes merely a beast. And as beasts go, man is nothing better than a homicidal monkey.

Guilt and shame
Only by accepting the dictates of guilt and shame can we throw off the putrid poncho. Shame is a gift that is not granted to many. It allows us to see deeply into ourselves. It enables us to make amends. Guilt, while more hollow than shame, is still a tonic for the selfishness of the consumer age.

Civility
People are social creatures. Our most important actions are those in which we engage with other men. We can best be judged by the degree to which our behavior is civil. Every uncivil act is a crime against the polis and against our better selves. It can be explained only by an advertising culture that has manipulated our monkey selves for its own purposes. We must counteract the ugliness of consumerism and the self-made man with the rigid dignity of our Puritan lineage.

THE DICHOTOMIES

Purpose vs. Meaning
As humans are a social race and defined by our striving for progress, purpose is a necessary corollary to human meaning. Similarly, without an understood concept of meaning, our purpose cannot be reasonably divined. One concept seems to simultaneously demand yet preclude the other.

Action vs. Contemplation
The mind is like light. It can either have weight or be in motion. In the West, our parable is the choice between Rome and Judea. The Romans cut their hair short, symbolizing that they were people of action. The Hebrews let their hair grow long in a demonstration that they were a contemplative nation. As regular folk, we are caught between the paths of Christ and Caesar and thus succeed as neither.

The Philosoph and the Spirit
Though thought can be employed in the service of Truth, there is an irrational element that the logician may never divine. In the beginning was the word, and it has power that cannot be subdivided or defined.

Freedom and Discipline
Without discipline there is no freedom. The world of the brute animal is filled with constraint. Only by the willful imposition of the structures of the human mind can we become free. If this imposition has negative consequences, it is because our minds are still weak and have not submitted to the secondary imperative.

CHIMERA

JUSTICE is neither benevolent nor true. It is typically retroactive, a response to its perceived absence. It is absurd to create something by first looking for its antithesis. What we mean by justice is really just an attempt at social consensus. It is a practical concept and not a moral imperative.

DUTY is the great bugaboo. It is enforced obedience, an attempt to disengage our moral compass. Every duty should be looked at as an individual action and subjected to scrutiny. An appeal to duty is truly doodee.

DEMOCRACY: The common man is often wrong. The public is subject to whim. Since the majority once wanted slavery and Mussolini, they could soon be coming for your own skin. Masses by definition are scary things. A political rally is little more than an organized mob. Never trust any movement that requires large gatherings of its followers to be effective. Those people should lead who have the moral imperative. In a benevolent society, the philosophers would be kings and the kings would be philosophers.

PRIVILEGE: Like children gathered around the dinner table, we all covet the privileges of others.

IDENTITY: The need for identity is our greatest weakness, the Achilles Heel which marketers and ideologues will use to suck us into their schemes. As long as we continue to crave identities that give us purpose and meaning, in the end we will all be played for suckers. The less you care about who you are and where you came from, the more likely you are to focus on something that matters.