The wisdom of G.K. Chesterton in "The Man Who Was Thursday"

Hearing Alan Watts speak highly of G.K. Chesterton I was inspired to read his novel The Man Who Was Thursday (first published in 1908; Chesterton lived from 1874 to 1936). I am impressed! It is usually described as a metaphysical thriller, which as ambitious as it sounds I must say it fully lives up to. It is also so much more, most superficially a kind of detective story, with much wisdom along the way not least about activism, which is why I found it surprisingly relevant to our sexualist movement. I recommend reading it as a philosophical exploration of activism and heresy, good and evil, and the meaning of the whole universe and existence itself. At the deepest level it can be read as an allegory of how God brings souls into the world:

“Are you the new recruit?” asked a heavy voice.
And in some strange way, though there was not the shadow of a shape in the gloom, Syme knew two things: first, that it came from a man of massive stature; and second, that the man had his back to him.
“Are you the new recruit?” said the invisible chief, who seemed to have heard all about it. “All right. You are engaged.”
Syme, quite swept off his feet, made a feeble fight against this irrevocable phrase.
“I really have no experience,” he began.
“No one has any experience,” said the other, “of the Battle of Armageddon.”
“But I am really unfit—”
“You are willing, that is enough,” said the unknown.
“Well, really,” said Syme, “I don’t know any profession of which mere willingness is the final test.”
“I do,” said the other—“martyrs. I am condemning you to death. Good day.”

Life is first of all surprise. The only known fact to begin with is that you are sentenced to death, from which all the variation of life springs out (you can't even know you are alive without knowing you must die). This is the "joyous cosmology" of Alan Watts which despite the latter's atheism and nihilism (Buddhism) bears an amazing resemblance to the cosmology of the deeply Christian Chesterton here. Given that you have accepted the challenge to be an activist or perhaps just to live at all, we get this delightful wisdom about how to go about it. Should people like anarchists, MAPs and sexualists disguise their identity? I know none of you will believe it, but there is much truth to this:

“The history of the thing might amuse you,” he said. “When first I became one of the New Anarchists I tried all kinds of respectable disguises. I dressed up as a bishop. I read up all about bishops in our anarchist pamphlets, in Superstition the Vampire and Priests of Prey. I certainly understood from them that bishops are strange and terrible old men keeping a cruel secret from mankind. I was misinformed. When on my first appearing in episcopal gaiters in a drawing-room I cried out in a voice of thunder, ‘Down! down! presumptuous human reason!’ they found out in some way that I was not a bishop at all. I was nabbed at once. Then I made up as a millionaire; but I defended Capital with so much intelligence that a fool could see that I was quite poor. Then I tried being a major. Now I am a humanitarian myself, but I have, I hope, enough intellectual breadth to understand the position of those who, like Nietzsche, admire violence—the proud, mad war of Nature and all that, you know. I threw myself into the major. I drew my sword and waved it constantly. I called out ‘Blood!’ abstractedly, like a man calling for wine. I often said, ‘Let the weak perish; it is the Law.’ Well, well, it seems majors don’t do this. I was nabbed again. At last I went in despair to the President of the Central Anarchist Council, who is the greatest man in Europe.” [...] I said to him, ‘What disguise will hide me from the world? What can I find more respectable than bishops and majors?’ He looked at me with his large but indecipherable face. ‘You want a safe disguise, do you? You want a dress which will guarantee you harmless; a dress in which no one would ever look for a bomb?’ I nodded. He suddenly lifted his lion’s voice. ‘Why, then, dress up as an anarchist, you fool!’ he roared so that the room shook. ‘Nobody will ever expect you to do anything dangerous then.’ And he turned his broad back on me without another word. I took his advice, and have never regretted it. I preached blood and murder to those women day and night, and—by God!—they would let me wheel their perambulators.”

And I know -- I know I will keep getting 99% anonymous comments after this hilariously touching quote too. But you are mistaken about the utility of keeping your true colors hidden in your daily lives as majors or bishops or whatever is your "respectable" role. The fact of the matter is that such secrecy is counterproductive not just to our movement but your personal safety against the feminist police state as well.

Certainly now that society currently isn't persecuting heretics. Even for sex crimes now when antisex is the state religion, the heresy itself isn't punished. Just watch me deny the metaphysical badness of sex in blog post after blog post without getting arrested -- or if I do get arrested, at least without conviction. Hey, even Heretic TOC is still up and I have no doubt women would let him wheel their perambulators because he is so open and honest about his activism, not the least bit creepy or hypocritical. The closest we come to punishing heresy is the obscenity laws, which admittedly come very close and sometimes do serve as repurposed blasphemy laws but still allow considerable rhetorical leeway. Chesterton allows us to imagine what it would be like if the police were philosophers and not just brutes:

“You are not sufficiently democratic,” answered the policeman, “but you were right when you said just now that our ordinary treatment of the poor criminal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you I am sometimes sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon the ignorant and the desperate. But this new movement of ours is a very different affair. We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives.”

I would add that most sex offenders have no political or philosophical beef with the sex laws. They have no interest in denying the supposed metaphysical badness of sex with minors, or women's right to regret-rape laws or whatever. They merely thought they could get away with breaking these laws, or that they are somehow more innocent at heart than other men doing precisely the same things. The protagonist replies thus to the policeman:

“How true that is,” he cried. “I have felt it from my boyhood, but never could state the verbal antithesis. The common criminal is a bad man, but at least he is, as it were, a conditional good man. He says that if only a certain obstacle be removed—say a wealthy uncle—he is then prepared to accept the universe and to praise God. He is a reformer, but not an anarchist. He wishes to cleanse the edifice, but not to destroy it. But the evil philosopher is not trying to alter things, but to annihilate them. Yes, the modern world has retained all those parts of police work which are really oppressive and ignominious, the harrying of the poor, the spying upon the unfortunate. It has given up its more dignified work, the punishment of powerful traitors in the State and powerful heresiarchs in the Church. The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have a right to punish anybody else.”

This is eerily similar to what I have been thinking ever since I was arrested in 2012 and found myself to be the worst person in the prison from the point of view of philosophical policing, because everyone else was this sort of "conditionally good person" or someone who had problems with impulse control and I alone a heretic. I marvel that I am not punished for speaking heresy against the sex laws while pathetic harmless wankers who would never say a bad word about the sex laws are.

But rest assured the police does not read Chesterton, and neither do the feminists who deliver their ideological premises. They are set to continue their absurdly misguided war on sex for a long time, which leaves us peace to organize our intellectual opposition. Newgon is on track to produce a powerful body of work which can jumpstart a movement for sexual liberation in no time when conditions are right. If the feminists wise up a little bit it it may well have to survive in illegal channels for a while like the "CSAM" the state also fights with perfect futility, but I am confident it will persist. The feminists can kill us, but they can't kill our ideas because we are already too many dedicated activists for that to succeed.

As to the book I just reviewed, there were no spoilers here. Go ahead and read it for fun and edification and perhaps even the deepest meaning Chesterton seems to intend, which is a sort of periphrasis of the Bible. It is not overly preachy, however, closer to Alan Watts as such. Although the subtitle is "A Nightmare," it feels uplifting in the end, whether you ultimately believe in a God or not. It is a bringer of good news as in a gospel and renewed sense of wonder. Poetry is the art of saying what cannot be said, and I think this succeeds as such. Since it cannot be put simply, you would have to read it to find out what this is. To me it even speaks to my role in the battle between good and evil as a male sexualist. To paraphrase the ending a little bit, I am left with an unnatural buoyancy in my body and a crystal simplicity in mind. I now feel in possession of some impossible good news which makes every other thing a triviality, but an adorable triviality.