TWO KINDS OF STRENGTH

Clive Murtagh had the education of Geoffrey Kearns in mind when he eventually broke the silence between them by remarking: "The reason the Church has traditionally protected and supported the weak against the strong is that they are at least potentially, if not literally, in line for the 'Kingdom of Heaven', since more disposed, in consequence of their comparative physical weakness, to truth and spiritual striving than the strong."

Kearns smiled deferentially on the reception of this conjectural information and then admitted that it made good sense to him, since, so he went on to explain, the weak were passively rather than actively evil - weakness being a kind of aborted or tenuous strength.

Murtagh nodded sagaciously, mindful of his acquaintance's predilection for ironic paradox. "Weakness isn't, admittedly, a quality directed towards transcendence," he averred, "but, rather, a quantity that stems less directly from the Diabolic Alpha, constituting, in consequence, an indirect approach to the Divine Omega."

Kearns considered the metaphor of a sculptor chiselling some quality from a quantity of marble, before asking: "Could physical strength be attributed to the Diabolic Alpha, then?"

"I doubt it," Murtagh replied in a tone of voice more confident than his choice of words suggested, "because the diabolical absolutism of the subatomic is beneath matter, since existing on the purely soulful level of proton-proton reactions. Rather, the Diabolic Alpha signifies a soulful, sensual strength that we identify with gravitational force. But this soulful mind of the subatomic can cool, in the case of small stars, into planets, hardening into crust as the flame recedes towards the core, becoming molten. And with the emergence of matter we have the basis from which physical strength in minerals, plants, animals, and men can grow, strength itself being either qualitatively active, as with human beings, or quantitatively passive, as with rocks and certain types of mineral formation. A strong man can lift a great weight, but the material lifted can also be strong, in the sense of difficult or impossible to break. Perhaps 'hard' would be a better definition."

Kearns nodded respectful confirmation, then said: "Whereas 'powerful' would be a definition better suited to the active sense of strength, since it's generally in that sense that we refer to strong people, not simply in terms of their actually being physically strong. The weak, on the other hand, don't act powerfully, but are usually acted upon. And on that account they're doubtless more suited to a contemplative, passive approach to life, such as the Church recognizes as indicative of a divine orientation, and which it to some extent encourages."

Murtagh agreed in principle with most of Kearns' statement, but chose to embellish on it by saying: "Of course, the terms 'strong' and 'weak' are subject to modification in the course of time and may imply different attributes in consequence. The distinction between the strong and the weak at an early stage of human evolution, up to and including medieval times, was physical, whereas these days it's usually intellectual, as when we speak of the clever and the stupid, the latter term generally implying intellectual weakness. A man may be physically strong but mentally weak or, conversely, mentally strong but physically weak, and, as a rule, the two attributes don't fit together, since the one only thrives at the expense of the other. Most clever men, whom we recognize as geniuses, have been physically weak, whereas most strong men, whom we recognize as tyrants, have been mentally stupid. Not absolutely stupid of course, but nevertheless relatively so by comparison with men of intellectual genius."

Kearns chuckled softly and admitted: "Whereas at one time brute force was the key to dominance, nowadays one has to have a considerable degree of intellectual cunning, which results in one's dominating others intellectually, in a spiritual distinction between the strong and the weak."

"Clearly, one can't treat the intellectually strong and the physically weak as synonymous," Murtagh averred in a meditative tone-of-voice. "For while the Church has traditionally supported and influenced the physically weak, it has failed to attract the intellectually strong, who, particularly in recent centuries, have remained outside it as enemies from above rather than, as with the physically strong, from below. Even the intellectually weak, who are more often than not quite physically strong, haven't been attracted by it."

An image of the average proletarian, muscular and coarse-grained, entered Kearns' imagination, and he had to agree with Murtagh that, from a traditionally pre-intellectual point-of-view, the physically weak had been and still were the Church's main concern, given the fact that it was a relative institution in-between absolute extremes. Murtagh, however, was no Nietzsche - intellectually strong but physically weak - to deride the Church for supporting the weak. He despised the physically strong and regarded the physically weak as closer to the Divine Omega, if in an indirect kind of way. The closest of all, in his estimation, were the intellectually weak, or those who, under a different system, would be encouraged to directly aspire towards transcendence from a post-intellectual bias in transcendental meditation. Regardless of their physical constitution, they would be closer to the Divine Omega during the process of cultivating awareness for its own sake than were those who habitually used awareness for some purpose extraneous to itself, like thinking or writing or reading, and who corresponded, in consequence, to the intellectually strong. As the physically strong had to some extent made the physically weak what they were, so the intellectually strong would likewise make the intellectually weak what they were destined to become - transcenders of the will through spiritual self-absorption. Probably the intellectually strong would no more meditate on a regular basis than their ancestral counterparts, the physically strong, had regularly attended church. There was always a distinction between leaders of one sort or another and led, that is to say, between the governing and the governed. Such a distinction would not cease to exist until the superbeing millennium, when there would be neither leaders nor led but only Superbeings hypermeditating towards transcendence; new-brain collectivizations artificially supported and sustained in the ultimate classless society on earth.

But Murtagh, in his identification with the intellectually strong, had no respect for anarchists or those who, through ignorance, confounded socialism with all power to the people on a literal basis ... in deference to a kind of Marxist purism. Such opponents of socialist leaderships were more often than not deluded as to the nature of the coming millennium, which they erroneously conceived in humanistic terms, failing to perceive that no human society can become truly classless, moneyless, stateless, etc., but must be led and, if necessary, goaded along towards a society that could become such - namely, a post-human one and, more specifically, the most extreme post-human one at that, not strictly post-human so much as post-superhuman, which would only arise with the second, or superbeingful, phase of the millennium in question.

Ah, the intellectually weak! There could be no question of the intellectually strong allowing power to get into their hands! The people ruled in a socialist society all right, but only through their elected leaders, using that term in its most profound sense. The Marxist purists, however, seemed to think that the proletariat should literally govern themselves without recourse to bureaucratic interference or surveillance, without the need, in other words, for machinery of state. Fortunately, theirs wasn't the voice of authority in socialist affairs but existed, more often than not, as a kind of ideological impotence in Western states where, compliments of bourgeois connivance, it was free to criticize socialist regimes from an anarchic point-of-view.

No, Murtagh had no respect for people's anarchists, except, he once said, when their anarchy was directed against the bourgeois state, where it constituted a kind of indirect path to socialism through rebellion rather than revolution. The true people's leaders, however, were socialist revolutionaries, the intellectually strong who sought power in the name of the people, and this whether in a so-called communist context - in reality Bolshevik 'Red Fascism' - or in a democratic socialist one, depending on the historical/ideological circumstances. These revolutionaries weren't imposed on the people from above, as in bourgeois or aristocratic states, but either directly stemmed from the people, as proletarians, or indirectly stemmed from them, as intellectuals who nevertheless had their interests at heart.

Such leaders, Murtagh had no doubt, were entitled to serve the people as they, with their superior moral and intellectual qualities, determined, and to continue serving them irrespective of whether certain wayward elements among their numbers thought that the people should literally serve themselves, not least of all by getting rid of all leaders! Paradoxically, it would be the leaders who were destined to get rid of themselves, though not before proletarian civilization had got properly under way and transcendental values begun to assume increasing importance. Then the political/artistic leadership would wither, while the religious/technological leadership proceeded to blossom, so that, eventually, with the dawn of the Superman, only the latter would remain, to direct the progress of superhuman life towards that point in millennial time when, following the removal of the old brain from individual supermen, life was upgraded to the superbeing level and the remaining leadership, or technicians, could safely depart the scene, leaving the collectivized new-brains to hypermeditate, in the most free earthly context, towards transcendence. In the meantime, all power to the intellectually strong!