Listening to an interview with various peace activists, (best quote, "We feel like the U.S. won but we [protestors] were defeated." Well, yeah) I was struck by their lack of interest in producing anything concrete from the various sit- defecate- vomit- sing-ins that were held. Some people would blame this apathy toward results on Kant, who insists that only intentions matter, but this interpretation of his Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morality is mis-reading him. He, in fact, starkly differentiates between mere hoping, and an act of will.

An act of will is just that, an act. It is not sitting in one's basement stabbing a voodoo doll which is dressed like Rumsfeld, or a protestor offering herself in exchange for all the lives that would be lost (a trick which has only worked once in history, and is unlikely to be repeated) or all the damn nudity all over the place. It is willing an act which has the greatest chance of morally achieving one's end. That is to say, greater will towards the good is shown by a country which builds itself up, creates the greatest military ever seen, and then takes unnecessary risks to itself in order to avoid killing civilians, than is shown by buying a bumper sticker. So Kant's not to blame. Which leaves...

Ah, Hegel. What it cannot do. Somebody set us up the bomb. And so forth. The key to the mysterious actions of various idiotarians was when one of them was discussing a fast (still not a good act, hippy. Get some will to Good into it! Lead with your chest!) and called it a "spiritual discipline". Now "spiritual" has a long and dignified career as a word, and I'll be the last one to claim that it is meaningless. But its meaning is not so loose as current usage would have it. It means "of the spirit", that is, of the realm which is beyond the material. It does not mean "lacking any causal connection but I want to do it anyway, so I'll claim that it's spiritual, which makes this definition circular in a post-modernist pleasing kind of way".

This idea that everything is connected through Spirit can, in Western thought, be traced back most directly to Hegel. According to him, all, properly 'seen', is Spirit, a great overarching plan to which all things bend. I'm para-phrasing, and playing fast and loose even with that, because, well, Hegel's tough. He's got his reasons and he's got his logic, and many people dismiss him without giving him a fair shake, just because he didn't like Newton's universal gravitation (which he didn't; he thought that the laws governing the fall of an apple and those governing the planets ought to be kept separate. I'm sure he had his reasons, but his attempt to share them with me has not gone well) or because they feel that he brought on relativism and post-modernism (which is false; that blame goes to Nietzsche, and he would be appalled by the scrawny, tenured professors who think that only they, as the super-man, have truly gone (kirkvoice) beyond Good and Evil (/kirkvoice). Listen, buddy, a truly Nietzschean philosopher will never be satisfied until he finds an opponent that cannot be defeated--only this tragic task will fulfil him. That is to say, a Nietzschean philosopher ought to be so powerful as never to stop until he is wrestling with and is thrown by Absolutes. Put that in your bong and smoke it, Mr. Mensch) or for whatever reason.

But the idea of all things being one Spirit, coupled with an amateurish interest in Eastern philosophy (on which topic I am not competent to digress, except to say that the writings of Lao Tzu are the most boring thing I've ever read, with the exception of my attempt on the Koran, and Atlas Shrugged (boy, that'll piss of a variety of believers)) lead to a rise in the cargo cultish behavior of certain groups. Listen, people, my cult has been bringing down planes for centuries. When you get one from your fasting or crystals or chanting, e-mail me.
odious5@lycos.com.

Please, no more South African gold offers. I've made my four million off of it, and I'm not greedy.