(from Beverly Hills Stories)
- Here's the problem. Social life rewards honesty and punishes dishonesty. This is called enforcement of being good. But social life also rewards dishonesty and punishes honesty.
- Why?
- Because pretending to be honest also gets you the social reward for being good. And being dishonest allows you to profit from deceiving people.
- We have reasons to be good and bad. Everyone knows that.
- We have social reasons to be good and bad. Because we are educated by society when we are too little to know what we are doing, be conscious of our learning the rules, we ascribe to a god our reasons for social behavior: a good god, or "God" when we are honest, a bad god, "the devil" when we are dishonest.
- Honesty is religious.
- Social honesty is religious. Personal honesty is something else. In personal life the truth is our material, our tool for problem solving and invention. A lie restrains our creativity.
- So truth in social life is rewarded and punished, but in private life only rewarded?
- Yes. Do you see what this means?
- Tell me.
- We live with others to learn from each other, but we pay a heavy price: we learn that honesty which is always good in private life is only sometimes good in social life. From the perspective of private life, social life as a whole, rewarding both honesty and dishonesty, confusing us about what it means to be honest, seems to be the devil's work we've collectively taken over.
- Which is why he can't get a job.
- Sometimes people can be too smart.
- People like me.
- The devil doesn't want to work for us, he wants us to work for him.
- Worship him.
- Yes.
- So you still think the Jews worship the devil.
- Some of them.
- For example, your strip-club friend, the real estate speculator?
- You know him?
- Yes. A couple weeks ago I was walking on my way to Starbucks when by chance I passed his house as he was riding up on his bicycle. I'd already met him with our host one midnight at the market. He insisted I come to his sister's house for the Jewish festival, the feast of the tabernacles. First he had to take a shower. He showed me in, put me out on the balcony to wait. I'm telling you this, because soon I hear shouting from inside, "Police"! "Stop where you are!".
- He's a volunteer Sheriff. He does that stuff all the time.
- Then he appeared completely naked out on the balcony, said "Nice to see you're Ok", and went back to the shower.
- So he's a homosexual. I wondered about him. He pays the girls to let him rub them, but doesn't want any more.
- He's protecting his public life from private life, making sure love of truth has no chance to develop.
- I don't understand.
- Do you know how the Jews became famously good at making money?
- No.
- They gave themselves complete flexibility negotiating the dangerous waters of honesty and dishonesty in public life. They kept their private lives separate. Your friend the speculator...
- He's not my friend.
- Of course, he's no one's friend. The Beverly Hills Jew, let's call him, in the service of making money has gone further, has eradicated private life. He wants to keep a distance from girls. He wants his contact to be deniable, to himself and others, wants its meaning to be negotiable.
- I showed him the video of UC Davis students sitting quietly down on a campus square being pepper sprayed by para-military units.
- They were ordered there by the University Chancellor. I'm familiar with it.
- Do you know what David said?
- What?
- "Better nip them in the bud."
- Childhood and youth, formerly sanctified preserves of private life, used to exempt from the adult American glory in the massacre of human nature. No more.
- And you don't think that's devil worship?*
* We humans are the only species that organizes itself to hunt, spy on, manipulate and kill each other.
