The man below is a source of your guilt, the man

above is a source of your frustration. You do not know what to surrender or

demand, when to give and when to grab, what pleasure in life is rightfully

yours and what debt is still unpaid to others—you struggle to evade, as

‘theory,’ the knowledge that by the moral standard you’ve accepted you are

guilty every moment of your life, there is no mouthful of food you swallow

that is not needed by someone somewhere on earth—and you give up the

problem in blind resentment, you conclude that moral perfection is not to be

achieved or desired, that you will muddle through by snatching as snatch

can and by avoiding the eyes of the young, of those who look at you as if

self-esteem were possible and they expected you to have it. Guilt is all that

you retain within your soul—and so does every other man, as he goes past,

avoiding your eyes. Do you wonder why your morality has not achieved

brotherhood on earth or the good will of man to man?

“The justification of sacrifice, that your morality propounds, is more

corrupt than the corruption it purports to justify. The motive of your

sacrifice, it tells you, should be love—the love you ought to feel for every

man. A morality that professes the belief that the values of the spirit are

more precious than matter, a morality that teaches you to scorn a whore who

gives her body indiscriminately to all men—this same morality demands that

you surrender your soul to promiscuous love for all comers.

“As there can be no causeless wealth, so there can be no causeless love or

any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality,

an estimate dictated by your standards. To love is to value. The man who

tells you that it is possible to value without values, to love those whom you

appraise as worthless, is the man who tells you that it is possible to grow

rich by consuming without producing and that paper money is as valuable as

gold.