The Moral Case for Supervillainy

(The following is an extended excerpt from something I'm working on - kind of a Galt speech for a character. Basic concept - a real life sort of "Bond Villain" who runs an 'evil' corporation that tries to overthrown foreign governments and the like for profit and that is building a SuperWeapon on its island. What I think of this really depends on my mood). The Moral Case for Supervillainy I want to tell you the story of my Grandfather. I didn’t know him personally very well - he died when I was young and, even when I knew him, he was an exhausted old man. But I know his story very well indeed. When he was thirty-four, because he happened to have ancestors born in Japan, the government came along and took everything that he had in the world. They took everything that he owned - and everything that his family owned. Fishing boats and farms. Furniture and homes. They took it all. And then they put him in jail. But, through all of that, somehow he never lost his faith. He was never overcome by the desire to sit in place and die. When the war was over, they let him and his young family out. They left them penniless, destitute, and in the middle of nowhere. So, my Grandfather started walking. He wasn’t legally allowed back on the West Coast yet However, fishing was his vocation and he could hardly do it from Alberta. So he left my Grandmother and my Uncle in an abandoned shack and made the trek on home. And so he went to work. He worked damned hard every day that he lived. And he built something again. Day-by-day he worked until he was able to buy a house in Vancouver for his growing family. Himself, my Grandmother, my Uncle, my Aunt, and my Dad. Then someone murdered my Uncle. He was just a child. Not even ten years old. The oldest boy. Someone murdered him. We don’t know who - even more than half a century later. But one day his oldest boy was just gone. They found him floating in a pool. And my Grandparents blamed themselves - they seemed foreign, they thought. It had made them a target. So they went back to work, now working even harder to fit in - to be model members of the community. They all worked for decades more. Joined by another boy, they worked on the boats and they worked in the canneries. And I really think that the struggle - that all of those burdens - broke the man’s health. By the time I knew him, he had retreated into himself - sitting and watching Japanese soap operas and meticulously recording all of them on the early VCR that my Dad and my uncle had purchased for him as a retirement gift. Why, I don’t know - my strongest memory of his home was that he had cabinets and cabinets full of video tapes. That home - that was the reward for all of his years of work. He bought it. He owned it. That was the financial legacy he had to pass on. And what a legacy! First, of course, it went to my Grandmother. My Aunt and her daughter lived there as well. In the overheated real estate market that prevailed by the time my Grandmother passed on it was worth the better part of a million dollars. I remember when he died - almost twenty years ago now - he spoke of the opportunities that he wanted me, the oldest Grandson, to have. But it was not to be. After my Grandmother’s death, we discovered that my Aunt had managed to have the house - the only real asset of the estate - transferred into her name at some point in the past. And there was nothing that could be done at that point to challenge that, the period for having done so long since passed. My Aunt, who had never held a steady job in her life and who raised a wild and worthless delinquent of a daughter, had taken the whole thing. Then she lost all of it - blowing through the money and then some on cars, fancy vacations, and unwise real estate purchases. In the end all that my Grandfather passed on to me was his own unbreakable will. Though, I wonder, to what end? After all, what lesson is there to be drawn from this story other than that sometimes, when you’re down, if you look up with hope in your eyes the universe will kick you in the face, put a boot into your back, and then take a piss on you? More broadly, the lesson to be learned here - the lesson I have taken away and I wish to impart upon you - is that the weak will take every opportunity to prey upon the strong. After all, it was the weak - weak and pathetic people - who bought the stolen property of the Japanese. Note here, the people who bought it were not strong enough to take it themselves, or to acquire it of their own will. Instead, they sought the intervention of some higher authority who then gave it to them. And it was the weak and pathetic - my Aunt - who destroyed so much of what my Grandfather had built. In our society, the demands of the weak - who will die useless, unloved, and unremembered by history - have been repeatedly allowed to carry the day over the needs of the strong. This is the most glaring disadvantage of an egalitarian and democratic society - in a world of “one person, one vote” - the voices of ten worthless peons such as my Aunt, who will make no mark on history and no contribution to humanity, civilization, or the world beyond the unproductive consumption of resources, are worth ten times that of one great man. And so we have a political class and economic system that is increasingly tilted towards pandering to the whims of the unworthy many over the requirements of the productive few. And in a similar way, so was the next generation and the one after that victimized. My father grew to become a Banker. And he was, I am not ashamed to admit, well-compensated for his services. Or, at least he was in theory. Except he was earning money in a time where socialism, both overt and covert, had come to hold sway over the halls of government. And, during his prime earning years - and my own formative years - he was saddled with a ruinous rate of income taxation that topped out at 54% at barely more than $70,000. Why was this? Were the years of my youth those of some great national or international emergency? No. It was because the political class, beholden to the whims of the parasitic money, decided that my family deserves to have less and others who did no work to earn it deserved to have more. I remember, and this is an indignity that burns to the present day, how during some of those years - in order to maintain just a simple Middle Class lifestyle while saving for the future - my Mother had to take menial jobs. I remember having to spend my days, while my friends were off enjoying their youths, helping her to deliver phone books. Phone books, ladies and gentlemen, because that was the state that socialism had left our economy in and because that was what was necessary to pay for the things that a Middle Class existence required. I think of that, and a fire within me burns. I remember how I lost out on things - important things - because I spent my weekends delivering newspapers in order to buy things that other people were just given. I remember how, in High School, I missed so much because I was working night shifts at a Safeway while my contemporaries were off being teenagers. And I’m sure that, if you are listening to my message, that you have memories of you own that you would like to share. Of how you may feel victimized by a society that seems to irrationally demand that some of its members work significantly harder than others and give so much more of themselves in the service of ungrateful masses. Yet, ladies and gentlemen, for all that you may feel you and I and everyone like us may feel the victim here, the truth is that you, me, my Mother, my Father, my Grandfather - all of us - we share in the guilt for all that has passed. We share in it because we have, for far too long, been the passive enablers of our own exploitation. Far too few of us have dared to stand athwart history, shouting stop. We have, like so many victims of abuse, meekly accepted the established order as just and eternal. But it is not just. I know it. You know it. Even the huddled and parasitic masses know it. It is not just and it cannot and it will not stand. “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves.” That, my friends, is true today as it was true then. All of us have, for far too long, been willing to accept a system that binds over the talented with chains of servitude. We have been too willing to accept moral, economic, and political constraints which serve no purpose other than to conscript us into the service of those whose lives will be little noted nor long remembered. In the natural world, the weak will submit to the leadership of the strong because it is necessary for their own survival. However, as we have been removed progressively further away from all evolutionary imperatives we have increasingly created a society wherein the strong, creative, and intelligent minority is made the keeper of the majority. Increasingly we have created a society where the labour of a productive few is expected to support a vast parasitic class that is sapping our will and resources. What the proponents of this system fail to recognize is that it is unsustainable in the long term. The incentives for the productive to cease to use their talents and instead depend upon others to provide for them are very strong. And so it is that we increasingly find ourselves living in a land of men who are not truly men in any sense of the word. Men who cannot provide for themselves or be counted upon to defend our civilization, their families, or even themselves. Young men who are a burden, and not a blessing, upon our country and our economy. And our enemies - and we still have many enemies in the world - watch this great hollowing-out with alacrity and interest. Consider, all of you, how much of your money goes and will continue to go in the future, to provide for the extended retirements and extremely long lives of people who contributed nothing to any of the rest of us. And consider not only the better uses that you could put that money to, but how those better uses might actually advance the human race as a whole rather than merely ensuring that some people may continue to consume oxygen. Think of that. Or, think of this: if you’re a relatively young person working full-time at a professional job, you probably have the exact same (or less) disposable income than some random person going through an extended adolescence at home. In fact, in their infinite wisdom, through various tax credits and subsidies, wealth is probably more or less directly being transferred from yourself to that individual. Imagine - if you are a young person today and the present system is allowed to prevail, then you are going to probably pay ruinous taxes for most if not all of your life to support the long and indolent retirement of a generation that squandered almost everything that their parents passed on to them and, in many cases, spent the years that they should have been raising our generation on various pseudo-adolescent exercises in “self-discovery.” In short, my friends, if you play by the rules then the system is going to screw you time and time again. Some people will tell you that this is a selfish creed. That’s nothing more than projection. What could be more selfish than demanding that other people live their lives an offer of themselves on behalf of others, only to then berate and demand more of those people? We are rapidly approaching a moment where we will have to make a choice about our own survival. If we continue to allow those around us to insist upon such an ahistorical social and economic system - with the best and the brightest being weighed down by anchors of indolent uselessness - we shall all drown. Because, ladies and gentlemen, the math is not in our favour. Not only will more people retire with each passing day, but also the advance of technology will increasingly render more and more people with no aptitude for anything beyond manual and closely-directed labour - economically obsolete. Like the starving mobs of old, these people will consume our resources, our reserves, and - when all of that is gone - the seed grain as well. Unless we can find the will to assert ourselves we shall find ourselves the victims of increasingly-onerous burdens of taxation and regulation and then, when even those shall fail to meet the demands of the mob, we shall likely be faced with ever-more odious measures such as demands for rationing, conscripted labour, and the forced seizure of wealth. If we take it, as we have in the past, then the universe will curb-stomp us. You know, I think that supervillians have gotten a bad rap over the years. Sure, some of them may have unwise and maniacal plans to poison cities for sport or to steal the British Crown Jewels but there are many others whose actions were nothing more than a reaction to a society that never valued or allowed them to claim an adequate reward for their talents and labour while, at the same time, demanding that those talents and that labour be turned to the use of ungrateful and undeserving others. All that many of them are guilty of is defying a society that doesn’t value them in the first place. We should keep them in mind as we learn to fight back. We should do so because most supervillians have one key feature in common: they have liberated themselves from the collective sense of guilt which demands that those of ability ought to allow themselves to be conscripted to the service of others. Going forward we must remember, as they already do, that we are not seeking to take anything from others that rightfully belongs to them, but that we are merely seeking to serve our own desires and our own interests and that, in so doing, we are doing nothing wrong. After all, what are the masses we are supposedly called to serve doing if it is not that? I, for one, tire of the argument that a society should be judged by the least among it. I do not know if there were any groups among the earliest humans who felt that way because, if there were, they all surely perished during the early years of man somewhere in Africa. It is the strong, the bold, the creative, and the brave who mark a civilization in the pages of history. Let us now join together to do what we know in our hearts is morally right: to refuse to be the guardians of a society that demands that we provide of ourselves that others may enjoy things that we cannot have. Let us recognize that the below-average cannot hope to save our civilization from destruction. Only we can do that and we will not do it if we are bound over and our resources devoted to those who cannot possibly assist. Let not our efforts be ultimately unrewarded. The epitaph of our civilization must be something more than, “they meant well.”