Our Tainted Ethics

In Boris Sidis’ Philistine and Genius you will come upon this memorable sentence: “The very men who looked down with delight when the sand of the arena reddened with human blood, made the theatre ring with applause when Terence in his famous line proclaimed the brotherhood of men….”

We are all incorrigibly moral. The worst of it is that we are proud of our incorrigibility. The wickedest man will stoutly maintain that his conduct has some higher purpose than self-satisfaction. (Vilely immoral persons have a most rigid justification of their code.) As far as he is concerned, there is no logic on earth, no controverting fact, that will shake his conviction. If it were not so, how could we explain man's inhumanity to man, and to woman, that makes countless thousands mourn? The stagey part he plays in life depends for its theatric success upon the conviction of an impersonal integrity, an impersonality by the side of which the affairs of his conventional and familiar self are trivial indeed. Pretence is the key to man's conduct in a so-called civilized society. That instinct for make-believe I shall call his the-atricalism. You can't rob man of his theatricalism. He knows that all the world's a stage and that playing a conspicuous role elicits applause and admiration. The one indispensable requirement is good acting. Even if one plays the villian's part, the listening world will applaud if only the acting—the dramaturgy of pretence—is absorbing. The instinctive need of approval—no man is sufficient unto himself, though some deluded souls are cynically joyous in the belief that they are—adequately accounts for man's habit of self-justification. The primal essence of all morality is the need of approval. Morality may be defined as the Art of Self-Approval.

Morality is a tyrannous code of agreements the open violation of which provokes such fierce and concentrated hostility that only very exceptional persons (occupying strategic positions in society) dare be out-and-out “immo