The Douchebag Bible (17 page)

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