Portrait of a Lost Soul

He was an Englishman. He had that aura of pride that befits his inheritance of Britian’s great empire and tradition. He often spoke lovingly of the institution of the monarchy and aristocracy, although he despised its current members. Nevertheless his frustrated rants would always end with the caveat that “better they be representatives of our nation than the useless masses.”

He himself was a product of those detestable masses. The particularities of his origins weren’t entirely clear, but I knew he was from a rough, northern region in England. His family was working class, although he flouted the menial traditions of his ancestry. Instead, he went to to London, and eventually the continent, to study philosophy.

Like many young people enchanted with new world of academic jargon, he initially embraced socialism and Marxism. Reflecting on him, it’s no wonder that he was seduced by this. He was a deeply resentful man.

It was only when he was protesting against student loans that he realized how ridiculous the whole schema is. How could he possibly lay the responsibility of his education on the British taxpayer? What did a construction worker have to do with his study of Kant and Foucault? This seems an obvious realization for many, but in the fervor of youth and the overly entitled world of the university, it’s easy to fall for these ideals. One has to give him credit for waking up to the nonsense his passions had led him to. He changed course overnight, putting his mind to the study of tradition and conservatism. I believe, that this was what led him back to a love and loyalty to Britannia and her institutions. It also provided him a justification and recognition of his native Catholic Church.

The return to his heritage was a courageous undertaking. I’m convinced that he had a deep desire for truth. He recognized that simply dismissing everything that had come before him would utterly derail that end. It was too purely arrogant and irrational a stance to take if one were conceivably in service of truth. He knew this.

For all his flaws, he was an eminently logical man. It was a great strength of his, although this did not necessarily translate to wisdom. He inevitably touched reason more often than not, but I don’t believe you would actually call him a reasonable man. There was too much of the human person that he simply dismissed. In his estimation, this was the obvious course. I don’t think he had the courage or perhaps even the tools to notice that his life was a testament that this conceptualization was faulty.

I believe he fancied himself a Roger Scruton. Both grew up in working class families, both had abusive or difficult fathers, both experienced the inevitable socialism faze, and eventually turned to tradition to understand their surroundings and themselves. When I knew him, he had not mastered the posh accent that Scruton so naturally adopted. He certainly waxed poetic on its beauty and superiority. I remember him playing videos of Queen Elizabeth in her youth, laughingly claiming, “Listen to her snobby voice. It’s perfection.” I never knew if it was his intention to mimic that. I recognized that while he loved it, he may have felt that it was inappropriate for him. He was, after all, the product of a long line of rough English working class.

I don’t think that caused him any distress. For all his loftiness, I never heard him speak disparagingly of his lineage. The abstracted common man was a different story. He understood the philosopher very much as many other philosopher in history have. I don’t hold that against him. There is a real transformation that takes place when one actually encounters higher thinking. The premises you once thought intuitive are devastated. It’s a humbling experience, relative to philosophy and greater men. However, it is easy to fall into a disdainful dismissal of men who know no better. Ultimately, one has to take intentional steps to stay that arrogance. It’s a difficult undertaking, but oftentimes, it can lead to the realization that while you may have deeper insight into certain aspects, the common man has his own wisdom that requires your humble submission. One cannot live without the other, and in the order of mere survival, the common man is eminently more valuable. He is the man most in touch with the earth, most aware of his grounding and what practically is required of him. Thomas Sowell’s scholarship makes this very clear.

The Englishman perhaps was not as appreciative of this as he should have been. I have not seen him for several years, so I cannot comment on his state now. I do remember being immediately warned of this dismissal by his attitude towards religion. He claimed that he was Catholic. The only problem was, he didn’t really believe any of it. I don’t know if he knew, but he fully embraced Marx’s immature relegation of religion as the “opioid of the masses.” He never called it that, but that was his attitude. I pushed him on that a bit. I found it remarkable that someone so immersed in Aristotelian philosophy could be so dismissive of religion. It follows that a man would choose philosophy so decidedly over religion, although no necessarily theology outright. Either way, I had never encountered that until I met him.

He laughingly claimed that Christ was a nice story, a kind of bludgeon with which the philosopher class instilled virtue in the common man. This is partially what I mean when I say he was a man without wisdom. One doesn’t have to believe fully in the Christ story as Christianity has claimed it throughout these 2,000 years; but a wise man would never reduce it to “just a story.” Even more clearly, a wise man would never categorize stories and myths as merely palatable philosophy for the masses. I am quite sure it’s quite deeper than that. I’ll admit, I’m heavily influenced by Jordan Peterson in that understanding. The Englishman also scoffed at him, muttering something about his neglect of the Hellenistic tradition.

Ironically, he was obsessed with hierarchy. I think it was partially reactionary to his youthful flirtation with Marxism and to the prevailing culture of absolute, unqualified “equality.” Hierarchy exists. It simply does. Any attempt to deny that is foolish; any attempt to enact that denial is genocidal. But his rigidity was unhealthy, and I think little more than a mask for his resentment. He was not an attractive man. In fact, when I first saw him, I thought him quite ugly and repulsive. I think that had less to do with his looks, as much as it had to do with his aura. His smile was more a sneer than an expression of happiness or joy. His bitterness radiated from him. I think he was deeply aware of this and comforted himself with the idea that his philosophical acuity made him a member of the elite. There is truth to this, I suppose. But the ways of the modern world made him lash out in anger. He raged against a society which he felt did not recognize him or his kind sufficiently. He was unaware of himself. He ascribed his love of philosophy to a genuine desire for truth. As I said before, I believe he had a deeply sincere pursuit in his heart. Yet, for all his contemplation, he had very little personal insight. His philosophy was almost the product of an echo chamber. In my encounter with him, it had very little particular existence in him. He had no means to act out what he learned, because he had little to no understanding of how he acted anything out.

When I first met him, I was too deeply emotionally perturbed to respond appropriately to the disturbing aspects of his character. I put no stock in my judgements and shook off my trepidation as mere overreaction. This was the wrong choice. My intuition was absolutely correct. But we laughed and talked together; we both liked philosophy and could argue Aristotle. And most surprisingly to me, he actually listened to me and heard what I said. I’ll never know if this was sincere or not; I’ll never know if he knows the distinction between sincerity and manipulation.

I repeatedly dismissed my growing suspicions. However, it was impossible to ignore when he showed me a viral video of a young, red-headed boy having a mental breakdown. It was dreadful to watch. A pathetic and utterly debased human being, who was not only unaware of his complete degradation, but perhaps unaware that he had ever had any dignity whatsoever. It made me sick to my stomach, both with pity and disgust. I was shocked when I looked over to see him laughing, uncontrollably. His face was contorted in a sort of sneering, his hand covering his mouth, while his other pointed emphatically at the screen. There was a smallness in his cruelty and a vulgarity in his enjoyment. I could not decide which image was more troubling to look at. I quickly averted my eyes to my lap, counting down the seconds until this hellish show was over. It was one of those seemingly innocuous moments in life that somehow reaches deeply inside your core and enters into an eternal memory. I can’t forget that scene. It is actually etched into my mind, and every time it comes to the forefront, my skin crawls. It’s so brutally ugly. If I compare it to the violence and abuse I faced at the hands of my kidnapper a few years prior to that, it comes nowhere near so disturbing an image as what I saw that night. It reminded me of the testament of the Yugoslovian Communist official, Milovan Đilas, who’s image of Stalin’s nobility came crashing under the weight of that same cruel humor.

He didn’t see it. He justified it with the comfort that his encounter with the superior world of philosophy kept him buffered from that kind of emotional turmoil. He could laugh at the fools from afar. The dis junction between the philosophical life and cruelty towards others never seemed to strike him as odd. What perturbed me more is that I couldn’t seem to decide which spectacle was worse. That evening, after we had said our good nights, I realized that plainly he was more disturbing than the little ginger. Here was a man who fancied himself exposed to the world of truths, free of the shackles of Plato’s cave, and yet his most basic human expressions came out twisted and ugly. Instead of understanding, compassion, or even disinterest in men who are enslaved to their vices, he was jubilant at the prospect of witnessing someone’s self-inflicted humiliation.

He would never have admitted that his life was in contradiction to his principles. He was most convinced that he was a man who embodied virtue ethics. Yet, as I have mentioned several times throughout this reflection, he was utterly bereft of internal knowledge. He had no insight into his irrational hatreds and his debilitating fears.

He made a big ado of how much he utterly hated Islam. He said that while ISIS was growing in power, he began to have serious anxiety and panic attacks. Reading the news or even hearing about them filled him with dread that nearly incapacitated him. I gently tried to probe that further. I knew that wasn’t normal. His excuse was that I could never understand; I was an American. America had not seen the same kind of terrorist violence that London had. I didn’t mention that fateful day in 2001. I thought it might be crass to bring up something so obvious. I did, however, tell him that my brother was deployed and currently engaged with ISIS and other terrorist organizations in the region. I also had survived a kidnapping two years earlier that took place only an hour’s drive from an Islamic State holdout. The thought of how much I could have been sold for has crossed my mind repeatedly. Yet, I can still read about ISIS without fear. He couldn’t account for it. He stubbornly stuck to his explanation that I was an American, buffered from any real threat.

I believe I know partly why he was so irrational about this problem. He absolutely hated death. It was the sole reason he despised Islam. He knew nothing of the religion save that it constantly reminded its followers of death’s imminence. I thought that was stupid reasoning; Christianity does the same. Ultimately, both religions promise good men eternal life. He refused to listen though. Every time I even mentioned the word Islam, his hackles would raise. He would accuse me of being naive, simply seduced by the overwhelming masculinity of the tradition. Seduction was far too hyperbolic a term. I am attracted by its strength and structure, but I am not naive. I have and continue to learn deeply about its traditions. He dismissed this, and relegated it to a conviction wrought by my feminine emotions, fervent in delivery but lacking in substance.

It was here that his greatest weakness became apparent to me: his utter disdain for women. He said to me, very plainly, that I was obviously inherently inferior to him, as I was less rational (which accounted for my interest in Islam, I suppose). This necessarily meant that women were not made as closely in the image and likeness of God as men were. I just stared at him when he said that. I remember feeling an overwhelming urge to laugh, but I think that would have been cruel. It wasn’t so amusing that he thought women were inferior; it was that the very weaknesses of his character were effeminate. He was an effeminate man. He would never admit to that. In his mind, he was the masculine specimen. He used to regularly boast to me about the length of his penis. I always hated that. I would simply look at the ground and not respond. It came across to me as desperate. It was.

He mirrored his mother, the cause of his distorted understanding of women. She was an anxious wreck of a woman. He told me she was utterly terrified of death and age. I give him credit; he was aware his own fear may have had something to do with hers. He characterized his parents’ marriage as happy, although given his understanding of a healthy relationship between men and women, I have my reasons to doubt his testimony. His father treated her well; he did not treat his sons well. The Englishman recalled to me the countless times he had been beaten or screamed at as a child. He said simply that his mother could not do anything about it. There was no anger there or resentment. I think he honestly loved his family, in his own way.

He projected her weakness — and by extension, his — on to all women. His dating history reflected that. The women he ended up choosing were all obviously emotionally unstable. I remember him telling me how he used to tell an ex-girlfriend that he had kissed his mother on the cheek just to get a rise out of her. I could not fathom that anyone would be so crazy as to be jealous of a man kissing his mother. He explained to me that she had been abused by her brothers growing up; for her, the lines between familial and sexual love were blurred. I was disturbed at how nonchalant he was, but he waved it off as something insignificant. How he had not put the pieces together on her erratic and desperate behaviors was beyond me. He was adamant that his theories on women were based on objective reasoning, rather than his very obvious pattern.

He told me that he would never walk behind his wife. I think he had swallowed some of the red-pill thinking. It showed in his treatment of everyone, including myself.

His rigid characterization of women masked his resentment. He hated men who were beautiful and rich. He was of medium height, a height that would not stand out in a crowd. He was skinny, but with that paunchy bloatedness that comes with sitting around inside too much. There was no vigor in his body. His diet consisted almost exclusively of pasta. He sneered at the men who wasted their time at the gym, muscular and mobile; he scoffed at business men who put their minds to making money and being successful. He thought that the highest man was the one contemplated. He resented that neither women nor the world gave him the due he thought he deserved.

In turn, He asserted control over weak women; I qualified as one at the time of our acquaintance. He was a deeply emotionally manipulative man. I was unaware of what he was doing, so subtle was his work. I had been abused before, but the men prior to him had been more honest. They had threatened and been violent; he wormed his way through exploiting my deepest fears and secrets. It was masterful. It blinded me. He abused the way a woman would, resentful, dishonest, pseudo-compassionately. He never knew; he thought himself utterly transcendent of the feminine emotions. His utter refusal to accept himself enslaved to a cycle of delusions of his enlightened philosophical state. It also wreaked havoc wherever he went. He was too emotionally unable to respond to people he came across. He compensated for his utter lack of skills in that department by spouting out universal truisms discovered by the Greeks.

I could keep writing. I recall countless conversations in which he revealed subtleties and a depth that he had little access to. I think I saw him more clearly than he saw himself. But I won’t write anymore. I have other things to do. It serves no purpose to detail what he did to me; all I will say is that he mistreated me shamefully. The farther I’ve gotten from that episode in my life, the more I have to wonder if he was aware at all. Did he know what he was doing to me? Did he think that he related to me as a healthy man relates to a woman? I have no clue. Thankfully, I’m not burdened with the responsibility of determining his culpability.

I have no ill will against him. All my anger melted away many months ago. My pity grew into love.

Still, I never want to see his face or hear his voice again.