My beloved, highly esteemed, strong-willed, and of course very patient gentlemen, … forgive me! I am not what I seem. Starting with a warning will be most judicious on my part; at the same time, it will be quite honest (honest, in the objective sense, of course). I am crazy, but I haven’t lost my mind! I was born with a personality disorder that is atypical, and problematic in some way. For a while, I flirted with the idea that what might fuel my obsession with moral and ethical codes was a shifting identity crisis of sorts. After all, we are all slaves to some vice or to some virtue.

In life, I have so often gotten into difficult situations and out of them that this has become almost a matter of habit with me. I have attempted suicide once, and I've been tempted three times to attempt it. In this bewilderment, I became aware that life, which means essentially what is possible for us to be, is likewise, and for that very reason, a choice, from among these possibilities, of what we actually are going to be. Trying to produce “what will sell,” due mainly to past education and to consumer’s society indoctrination, is a suicide. The proper name for it, indeed, is “servility”; and at the same time, precisely for that reason, I prefer living to dying.

I find the aspects of chance versus free will and cultural influence to be the most intriguing. In our society, somehow, incivility has gained acceptance; it has been often camouflaged with the idea that it’s not a real enemy, but a tactic. To be of the left is like belonging to the right; they likely have a “brain function” with partial lobe paralysis—in a nutshell, Homo sylvestris in a type of social duel with political claims, like a five-year-old child when it’s dark. Their house is filled with monsters in the closets, under the beds, in the attic, in the basement, and just about everywhere. They are incapable of seeing they are participating in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability, changing things forever, for everyone. According to evolutionary thinking, our hominin ancestors evolved a larger brain due to a number of selection pressures, and evolved to have intelligence modules to communicate with each other. The word “civilization,” in fact, presupposes the radical progressive desire on the part of each individual to take others into consideration. Civilization is, before all, the will to live in common. Homo sapiens are uncivilized beasts in the degree to which they do not take others into account. Brutality is the tendency to dissociation.

The hardest part in confessing all this is that, aside from my pronounced anankastic personality, I can't really justify our ways of resolving conflicts. I have to confess my inscrutable, or maybe even arbitrary, nature, whether mystic, or even “willful,” that connects the present with the past, not as a static “now,” nor as a chain of “nows” rolling off into the infinite, but as a “now” that bends back into itself. I always, both instinctively and automatically, and sometimes even consciously, that is, on principle, find a way to extract the seed of happiness and water it by only contemplating it. I am awestruck by dreams. Life is my dictionary. The pigeons in the park remind me that there are no leftovers; everything is bread. I have marshalled a substantial amount of evidence to support my claims that everything that isn't given doesn't accumulate; it's lost. I freely admit a faith in progress, which I have inherited from the Renaissance; it was Bacon's view of induction that first, many years ago, interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my inquiries in the field of speculative philosophy.

Goodness I call the habit, and goodness of nature, the inclination.