Read The Douchebag Bible Online
Authors: TJ Kirk
would be an act of hypocrisy and inconsistent with the
hitherto defined parameters of human discourse. In other
words, the pot cannot call the kettle black (the kettle
remains black, but the pot’s blackness negates this
criticism or makes it universal and thus pragmatically
irrelevant).
4. Because delusion is invariable and presumably
inescapable, no one sense of self can be seen as superior in
veracity to another.
5. An evil man who perceives himself as good cannot be
contradicted by other men (for reasons explained in
supposition #3) or by an established system of ethics
because ethics is either derived from
a.
man
, who is delusional and cannot rightly judge other
men’s deluded narratives.
b.
God,
who cannot be verified to exist. Even if we simply
made the huge assumption of his existence, his will
regarding our behavior (if he even has one) would not be
readily known to us.
c.
Nature,
which can be disputed, as shown by all manner
of precedent.
It’s hardly original to argue against a concrete good and evil, but
surely in the face of genocide and mass murder, we would be
better served if such an objective morality (or ethical truth if you
prefer) was somehow in place.
We find ourselves in an unenviable position. We can
choose to persist in the deluded view of moral certitudes and
objective right and wrong or we can accept that no such thing
exists and attempt to justify our persecution of evil in other ways.
Honor: Another String Tied To The
Human Marionette, Nothing More.
A friend of mine said of me recently, “I'm friends with TJ for the
same reason people keep snakes as pets—the snake is fun and
cool and really interesting to watch, but of course you don’t expect
to get any warmth or compassion from it.” He went on to say that
I possess an “utter lack of humanity.”
Should such a thing bother me? I must admit that I have
long been aware that I lack certain sentiments that seem to widely
characterize my species, but I’ve never thought of myself as
lacking humanity. I seceded from it, sure. But that’s just a cute
thing to say to make everyone say, “Wow, that guy sure is
hardcore!” and cream their jeans in unrestrained admiration for
my greatness.
I must confess though, I do find many human conventions
quite antiquated and wholly unworthy of the attention of 21st
century people. Honor, for instance, that long revered staple of
masculinity and masculine values, holds no weight at all with me.
I find myself bizarrely perplexed when others expect me to be
beholden to it.
A recent example involves a bet that I made with a
YouTube user going by the moniker of BigEvasive. BigEvasive
was looking very forward to this year’s summer blockbuster
The
Incredible Hulk
, which was a franchise reboot of director Ang
Lee’s 2003 flop
Hulk
. I told him that, in my opinion, The Hulk
was a stupid character and it didn’t really matter who directed or
acted in a film about him, because the source material is simply
not of sufficient quality to inspire anything but a mediocre film.
This argument eventually turned into a bet that
The
Incredible Hulk
would far surpass “Hulk” in critical accolades.
For our wager we used the critical consensus site Rotten
Tomatoes4, which compiles hundreds of film reviews, categorizes
them into two classes—fresh and rotten—then averages them out
in order to come up with a rough over-all picture of what critics
thought of any given film. “Hulk” had received a freshness rating
of 61%, which meant that 61% of the reviews that Rotten
Tomatoes had compiled had given the film a positive review. In
order for BigEvasive to win the bet, “The Incredible Hulk” had to
surpass the original by a statistically significant margin. We
determined the margin to be 5 percentage points. In other words,
it had to receive a freshness rating of 66% or higher in order for
him to win the bet.
The stakes were that if he lost, I had to paint myself green
and make a video where I behaved like The Incredible Hulk. If he
lost, he had to dress as Marilyn Monroe and sing
Happy Birthday
To You
to me.
“The Incredible Hulk” opened and reached a freshness
rating of 68%5.
I had lost the bet. Now it was time to pay up. Or was it?
BigEvasive was located all the way in Canada and I knew him well
4 http://www.rottentomatoes.com/
5 It should be noted that “Top Critics” (meaning critics actually employed with
reputable publications), gave the movie only 59%.
enough to know he was too chickenshit to really put me in any
sort of difficult position if I neglected to fulfill my end of the
bargain. Honor never factored into my decision to “welch” on our
bet. I didn’t feel that warm and tingly masculine ethic tugging at
my heartstrings, informing my conscience that I would be
diminished in some profound way if I didn’t paint myself green
and gallivant around smashing things in the fashion of a third-
rate comic book character.
As ridiculous and sophomoric as the whole situation was,
the small backlash that it inspired6 set my mind to wondering as
to the exact nature of honor. It’s a word that we all hear tossed
around a lot, but I for one have never had the concept explained
to me.
Consulting the dictionary was useless. It contained 13