Scandal
For instance, the convert discovers that ‘scandal’ does not mean ‘gossip’; and the sin of causing it does not mean that it is always wicked to set silly old women wagging their tongues.
Scandal means scandal, what it originally meant in Greek and Latin: the tripping up of somebody else when he is trying to be good.
— G. K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion, ‘The Real Obstacles’, 1926.
One of the common causes of scandal is envy. But there can be scandal without envy (as we’ll see), and there can be envy without scandal (e.g., when envy is happily repressed by the person affected by such a drive). It is important to have a clear understanding of the difference between these two evils.
(On envy)
Alexander Dugin recently said:
The very concept of the success is deeply immoral. If you are successful the other is loser. We shouldn’t accept it. We should prosper or suffer together. Otherwise it is satanic.
No one has observed more frequently or with greater grief than yours truly the very common success or victory of evil and error in the world. Yet this phenomenon of evil or error prevailing is met with justified repugnance precisely because of the desire that good should prevail and that the best should win — as is said and extolled at the beginning of competitions. This is so precisely because we know that in this life the best is not always the one who wins.
(See: Siempre se van los mejores: The good die first.)
(See also: On my names.)
By contrast, repugnance towards, and opposition to, success as such are absurd, I’d even say impossible: its very existence is hard to conceive even by the most deranged, ‘immoral’ or ‘satanic’ mind (to use the same terms as Dugin).
What does make sense is repugnance and opposition to success regarded as entirely alien to the success of your own vainglory.
And clearly such an attitude (which seems copied from the one Dugin expresses — passing it off as the authentic moral position) does not spring from the Good and from goodwill, but from pride (superbia) and envy, by which you’d reject and seek to prevent the success — and even the mere existence — of any good that does not also promise to bring with it your own success.
In this case, your primary desire wouldn’t be that the best should win, but that you should win, and you alone, even though you are not the best and your ascendancy implies nothing objectively or universally good, and all of this while you are conscious that — or you don’t even care if — your success does not correspond to the objective, universal good — nor is it either the best outcome for you, but only for your vanity.
It should be emphasised (again) that envy is not necessarily behind scandal, which could also be motivated, e.g., by some form of mad love, by laziness, by fear, by sadism, by scientific curiosity, by economic expediency, by the pleasure that someone might derive from seeing his contempt manifestly influence the mind and behaviour of another person… It could be (likewise) collateral damage without any personal motives, or it could form part of a social experiment or psyops with a variety of motivations — even well-intentioned ones!
Because of the abnormal, systematic contempt indicated by the visible numbers, I have often delved into the scandal applied to my Twitter account, the causes of which remain a mystery to me.
Next, we will address a more concrete example of scandal, which in this case would be driven (hypothetically) by unfair competition, aided by attempts at psychological manipulation of the scandalised person and everyone around him.
Unfair competition can force you into the awful* position of having to defend your own work, lest it disappear into oblivion; and then people may claim that nothing of yours is worth defending because of your ego**.
(*) See: Physical self-defence versus intellectual self-defence: BODY MATTERS
(**) Ego versus egoism; miserly and ignoble propensities; and megalomania* —— Taking oneself seriously, laughing at oneself, and the importance of what others think of us
Somebody could force you to get soaked in the rain — so he can claim that no one appreciates you because you’re drenched!
(Estás mojado: ya no te quiero (You’re soaked: I don’t love you anymore))
Let us suppose that a petty individual undermines the good done by, through, and for, the person he perceives as a rival — a good that would benefit everyone, the whole, but not the sterile, selfish, strictly personal well-being of the petty individual.
It’d be almost impossible for anyone to ever detect the boycott, much less the reasons for the boycott, but the forced self-defence of the boycotted individual would be in plain sight of everyone.
Since only the boycotter could have knowledge of the boycott, he wouldn’t appear as what he is: he would not appear, as far as this matter is concerned, in any way.
And since self-defence (along with the defence of a universal good), even if awful, is not necessarily an argument against the one defending himself (together with, and owing to the universal good), the boycotted person would not, in principle, appear burdened with a bad public image.
But sooner or later, either by the same little boycotting individual, or by other individuals of the same ilk, the self-defence of the boycotted would be publicly portrayed as that of a bad person, narcissist, egomaniac, psychopath, etcetera.
And it would be then that we would have a clue to the boycott that until then had been invisible.
And that would be when almost everyone, instead of observing and deducing the obvious, would take sides against the boycotted person, considering him a bad person, narcissist, egomaniac, psychopath, etcetera.
Mastery can only be fully recognised by another master (a potential master, at least); but, for the most part, people will recognise mastery, and yet — for the most part — they will not acknowledge it aloud*, nor will they do anything but trip up the master — unless they eventually consider that the good of the master and of mastery could also bring with it, directly, indirectly, their own good (or to be exact: their own personal well-being understood as the satisfaction of primary, selfish, petty and sterile appetites, such as vainglory).
(*) ‘But passion most dissembles, yet betrays’
What mostly acts, therefore, against the particular good of the master and the universal good that (his) mastery entails is not so much a technical incapacity (blindness, mental limitation) as an evil in act.
If the cause of the stumbling block (scandal) were blindness or stupidity, perhaps the perseverance of mastery would be meaningless, since nothing could be done against such incapacity (it would be like doing everything for no one, for nothing, talking eternally to a brick wall); but since it turns out that the main problem is evil, the paradoxical (?) consequence is that there remains hope that good may prevail (albeit not so much — in this life — for the bearer of good):
people in the future, even if they are as evil as the master’s contemporaries, will no longer have reason to consider the master a threat to the spurious interests of their vanity, so there will then be no obstacle, stumbling block, tripping, unfair competition for the master, nor, therefore, for mastery and universal objective good.
This justice — posthumous for the master, yet always welcome and good for the world — could even be given by contemporaries of the bearer of good, provided that he had died before them, because then they could celebrate calmly, without fear, the privilege of having been firsthand witnesses to the master’s mastery during his lifetime.