The man below is a source of your guilt, the man
above is a source of your frustration. You do not know what to surrender or
demand, when to give and when to grab, what pleasure in life is rightfully
yours and what debt is still unpaid to others—you struggle to evade, as
‘theory,’ the knowledge that by the moral standard you’ve accepted you are
guilty every moment of your life, there is no mouthful of food you swallow
that is not needed by someone somewhere on earth—and you give up the
problem in blind resentment, you conclude that moral perfection is not to be
achieved or desired, that you will muddle through by snatching as snatch
can and by avoiding the eyes of the young, of those who look at you as if
self-esteem were possible and they expected you to have it. Guilt is all that
you retain within your soul—and so does every other man, as he goes past,
avoiding your eyes. Do you wonder why your morality has not achieved
brotherhood on earth or the good will of man to man?
“The justification of sacrifice, that your morality propounds, is more
corrupt than the corruption it purports to justify. The motive of your
sacrifice, it tells you, should be love—the love you ought to feel for every
man. A morality that professes the belief that the values of the spirit are
more precious than matter, a morality that teaches you to scorn a whore who
gives her body indiscriminately to all men—this same morality demands that
you surrender your soul to promiscuous love for all comers.
“As there can be no causeless wealth, so there can be no causeless love or
any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality,
an estimate dictated by your standards. To love is to value. The man who
tells you that it is possible to value without values, to love those whom you
appraise as worthless, is the man who tells you that it is possible to grow
rich by consuming without producing and that paper money is as valuable as
gold.
