Repaying the Debts of the Past

Food for thought.

The following is one of many interesting quotes from Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, this one by the main character Severian:

we strive to repay the debts of the past with the debased currency of the present

The meaning of that should be clear. When we try to redeem our past sins with present actions, we often fall short. When we try to compensate for the wrongs we did to someone in the past by helping someone else (or even the same person) in the present, we also typically fall short. And if we try to “pay it forward” by performing a good deed today to repay one we ourselves have received, this too all too often falls short.

In the book, Severian spared the life of a woman after having failed, in the past, to save the life of a woman he loved; it was poor compensation and an insufficient payment, with a “debased currency” – hence the quote.

An example of this, relevant to activism, was my past error in spending so many years as a loyal acolyte of Der Movement, for the most part drinking the “movement” “Kool-Aid,” with only the occasional act of rebellion. By supporting Der Movement and its “leaders,” and by, at least indirectly, enabling Nordicism by supporting Der Movement and its “leaders,” even when I was openly opposing Nordicism, I incurred a debt, a debt against what is right, and I strive to repay that debt by speaking the truth about Der Movement today. However, the “currency” I use to repay that debt, opposing a “movement” that I supported when I was younger and more energetic, is, in a sense, “debased.” I do the best I can, but it is not truly possible to undo the sins of our past.  All we can do is peddle our "debased currency" and attempt to redeem ourselves and move forward. 

Of course, it is possible to spend so much of this "debased currency" as to make a real difference. It is also possible that the actual quality of the work you do today (I won’t specifically comment on my own work here, as I am not an objective judge of that) is superior, at least in some ways, to what you did in the past. Even so, even if the work of today is, objectively speaking, actually superior, it is still a “debased currency” because the proper time to have done this work was back when you were instead sinning. The passage of time, the damage that has been wrought, the paths taken and not taken, have all resulted in a form of “inflation,” so that a given amount of work, and a given quality of work, is worth less today than it would have been in the past, when, properly leveraged at the appropriate time, it could have set everything on a different and better path than what actually occurred. In this manner, the actions of today are "debased" in comparison to those of the past, even if the former are objectively, and in isolation, in some way superior to the latter.

Getting back to my own example, if I had opposed Der Movement as strongly and consistently 20 or 25 years ago as I do today, that would have been, on a “dollar to dollar currency basis” more valuable than what I can do today among the wreckage of the current “movement” (a wreckage I must assume some, albeit small, degree of responsibility for). But we cannot change the past, only work today to change the future.

There’s a flip side to my own responsibility - there are the debts incurred by others due to their actions toward me. My loyalty to Der Movement was repaid by overt “slap-in-the-face” disloyalty toward me in return. That was sometimes direct and personal, but more often indirect, e.g., by Der Movement’s promotion of an exclusionary Nordicism. Unfortunately, ultimately, it took such repeated “slaps” to wake me up; before, I still had delusions that Der Movement could be reformed. Der Movement’s “leaders” should remember the W.H. Auden quote in The Honourable Schoolboy:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

Or, more crudely: “What does around, comes around.”  True enough, I can only repay their disloyalty and contempt with today’s “debased currency,” but, still, that was a self-inflicted wound on their part. Alienating your own supporters and writers doesn't seem to be a winning strategy. We can also consider this Shakespeare quote in Salter’s On Genetic Interests:

KING HARRY

Therefore take heed how you impawn our person,

How you awake our sleeping sword of war.

We charge you in the name of God, take heed,

For never two such kingdoms did contend

Without much fall of blood, whose guiltless drops

Are every one a woe, a sore complaint

'Gainst him whose wrong gives edge unto the swords

That make such waste in brief mortality.

…

May I with right and conscience make this claim? 

Shakespeare, Henry V, 1500, Act I, Scene I

The Quota Queens have always been unable to "take heed."

In the same Wolfe book series mentioned above, Severian also stated:

our greatest flaw is that we can only be what we are

I at least have the self-awareness to realize this about myself. If you continue to believe that your “movement” “leaders” have the same level of self-awareness, I can tell you that you will be bitterly disappointed.

And if someone asserts that this post is an example of the self-indulgent navel-gazing I criticize in others, I respond that the post is aimed at warning others, particularly younger activists. I would suggest that those activists not waste time and energy as I did, enabling everything that is wrong about White racial activism.