This project aims to recreate Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” with modern vocabulary and setting whilst remaining faithful to its original energy.
Previous instalments of “Posts”: Pt. 1 Ch. I, Pt. I Ch. II, …
III
Think about people who know how to take revenge and generally stand up for themselves — how does that even work? When they get gripped by, say, the feeling of revenge, nothing else remains in their entire being at that moment except this feeling. A bloke like that just charges straight at his goal like a raging bull, horns lowered, and only a wall can stop him. (By the way: when faced with a wall, these types — I mean, the NPCs, the achievers — they cave genuinely. For them, a wall is not an excuse like it is, for example, for us thinking types, and therefore people who do nothing; not some cope, a cope that our lot usually doesn’t even believe in ourselves but which we’re always very glad to have. Nah, they cave with complete sincerity. The wall has something calming for them, something morally cathartic and final, perhaps even something mystical... But more on walls later). Right, so this is exactly the type of man I consider real, normal, the kind that gentle mother nature herself wanted to see when she lovingly spawned him on earth. I seethe with jealousy even thinking about him. He’s a midwit, I’m not arguing that, but maybe normal people are meant to be midwits, how would you know? Maybe it’s even very beautiful. And I’m even more convinced of this dark suspicion that if you take the opposite of the normal person — the hyper-conscious type who came not from evolution but from a lab (bordering on conspiracy here, dear readers, but I suspect this too) — then this lab-grown man caves so hard before his opposite that with all his hyper-consciousness he genuinely sees himself as a bug, not a man. Even if it’s a hyper-conscious bug, it’s still a bug, while that’s a human being, and therefore... etc. And crucially, he himself sees himself as a bug; no one’s telling him to; and that’s an important bit. Now let’s watch this bug in action. Say it got owned (and it’s basically always owned) and also wants revenge. The spite accumulated in it might be even greater than in a Nietzschean normie. The nasty, petty urge to hurt the offender back might fester even worse in it than in a Nietzschean normie, because a Nietzschean normie, in his midwittery, sees his revenge as straightforward justice; whereas the bug, thanks to hyper-consciousness, negates that justice. It finally gets to the actual moment, the act of revenge itself. The pathetic bug, on top of the original grievance, has managed to spiral into so many other grievances in the form of questions and doubts; has stacked so many unresolved questions onto the one question that inevitably some kind of toxic sludge accumulates around it, some stinking mess made of its doubts, its spiralling, and finally the spits being hurled at it by the achievers standing around like judges and dictators, absolutely cracking up at it. Obviously, all it can do is cope: a smile of fake contempt it doesn’t even buy itself and shamefully crawl back into its hole. There, in its disgusting, stinking corner, our owned, beaten and bullied bug immediately sinks into cold, toxic and, crucially, eternal spite. For forty years straight it’ll replay the offense down to the last humiliating detail, each time adding even more humiliating details from its own mind, maliciously mocking and trolling itself with its own imagination. It’ll be ashamed of its own fantasies, but still it’ll remember everything, go over everything, make up total bullshit under the pretext that it could have happened too, and forgive nothing. Maybe it’ll even start taking revenge, but somehow in bits and pieces, petty things, passive-aggressively, anonymously, believing neither in its right to take revenge nor in the success of its revenge, knowing in advance that from all its attempts to get revenge it’ll suffer a hundred times more than the one it’s avenging itself on, who probably won’t even give a shit. On its deathbed it’ll remember it all again, with compound interest over all that time and... But it’s precisely in this cold, disgusting half-despair, half-delusion, in this conscious burying of itself alive out of grief in its hole for forty years, in this intensely made up yet still somewhat questionable hopelessness of its situation, in all this poison of unsatisfied desires turned inward, in all this fever of doom-spiralling, of decisions made forever and then regretted a minute later — this is where lies the essence of that strange pleasure I was talking about. It’s so subtle, sometimes even subconscious, that slightly limited people or even just mentally stable people won’t get any of it. “Maybe those who’ve never got bullied won’t understand either,” you’ll add with a smirk, and thus politely imply that I’ve probably been bullied in my life, and that’s why I speak as an expert. I bet that’s what you’re thinking. But guys, chill — no one bullied me though I couldn’t care less what you think. Maybe I even regret not bullying more people in my life myself. But enough, not another word about this extremely interesting topic for you.
I’ll continue calmly about mentally stable people who don’t understand these esoteric pleasures. These types in certain situations will absolutely lose their shit, go full ape mode, screaming at the top of their lungs, even though supposedly this makes them look alpha or whatever, but like I said, the second they hit actual impossibility they just cave. Impossibility — you mean a wall? What wall?
Well, obviously — biology, studies, data, mathematics. Once they prove to you, for example, that you evolved from apes, there’s nothing to do but accept it as is. Once they prove with peer-reviewed studies that, essentially, one inch of your own fat arse should matter more to you than a hundred thousand people like you, and that this conclusion ultimately explains all so-called ethics and social contracts and other cope and delusions, well then just accept it, nothing to be done, because two times two is mathematics. Try to argue with that, bro.
“Well, actually,” they’ll scream at you, “you can’t argue with facts and logic: it’s LITERALLY two times two equals four! Biology doesn’t care about your feelings; it couldn’t care less about your desires or whether its laws hurt your feelings. You MUST accept reality as it is, and therefore all its results. A wall is LITERALLY just a wall... etc., etc.” I mean, who gives a fuck about biology and math, what if I simply don’t like your laws and 2x2=4, huh? Obviously I won’t literally bash my head against a wall if I can’t break it, but I’m also not going to submit to it just because it exists and I lack the strength.
As if a wall were actually comforting and actually contained some final truth about reality, just because it’s two times two equals four. What a fucking joke! How much better to understand everything, be hyper-conscious of everything, all the impossibilities and walls; to refuse to accept any of these impossibilities and walls if accepting them makes you sick; to follow the most inevitable logical chains to the most disgusting conclusions about how somehow even with the wall it’s your fault, though it’s obviously, clearly not your fault at all, and because of this, coping and seething in silence, to sink into that sweet paralysis, realising you don’t even have anyone to be mad at; that there’s no target, maybe never will be; that it’s all gaslighting, manipulation, psyop, just incomprehensible slop — who knows what and who knows who, but despite all the unknowns and manipulation, it still fucking hurts, and the more of it is unknown to you, the more it hurts!
Was definitely worth the wait. Can't wait for the next part
It's very cool
signed: "an imp, not a girl"