The National Debate (3): Never Lie to Yourself
Something I heard from someone as a child. Or maybe something I read in a passage somewhere. I was never sure of the source, but it lodged itself in my mind and never left. Just a thing I happen to remember.
Everyone wears a mask in this life.
Why? Because most people are too weak to bear their own desires.
So the weaker you are, the more you will have to turn your face away from what you want. Moments will always come when you must look away from something, just so you will not have to desire it. And so you will live wearing a mask, pretending you do not pursue the thing you truly want.
It will be a hard, miserable life. A life of endless fighting against the you who keeps making excuses. A life of always putting everything off until some future that you may never even reach.
You will think it is unfair. You will want to deny reality. You will want to say the world is wrong.
When that time comes, for someone who has to live that kind of life, lying will become a great source of strength. It will keep your mask in place. Through the belief of others that your mask is who you really are, it will gift you a more natural one.
Think about it. Doesn't that sound like a tremendous help?
That is why this treacherous tool must be handled with the utmost care. Like a glass sculpture that shatters at the slightest pressure. Like a monster that will devour you the moment you make it even a little uncomfortable. You must always stay focused. You must never look away.
How do you handle it, you ask?
By always keeping this one law: when you lie, you must never, ever lie to yourself.
You may lie to others — to your parents, your friends, the public, even your teachers — but you must never do so to yourself. To yourself, you must speak only your true desire: the one that surges up from a place in the heart so deep that humanity has never found it, bursts through your mouth, and shatters the mask you are wearing.
Otherwise you will become like a sailor who has lost his ship, drifting on the open sea, swept up in other people's desires and other people's lies. The lies will swallow you whole. You will forget what your true desire even was, and you will live believing that the desire others wanted you to have is your own.
The fastest, surest way to lose yourself is to whisper lies to yourself in the same breath that you lie to others.
So remember this.
When you have to lie, hide the truth, and turn away from what you really feel — you must cry it out inside your heart. That pure desire surging up from the deepest part of you!
Only then can you stop the endless fighting. Only then can you gain yourself as your most steadfast ally. And you will never lose yourself.
Always remember. Do this, and you will never live a life of losing yourself and wandering. You will keep the reins of your own life in your hands.
I don't know. It could have been a conversation. An essay. An explanation. I can't even remember what form it took, and I tried to find the source and never could. But the content is burned into my mind with perfect clarity.
The reason you must never lie to yourself.
And so, right now, I am lying.
Because I am weak. Because if I want to eat better and live better, I have to deceive other people and wear a mask. So I am mixing truth with falsehood, hiding my real intent, and fooling the public.
I think the life of a modern middle-class man is better than that of a primitive chieftain. I would rather live inside the hamster wheel than wander around looking for tomorrow's food. A warmer home, better food, better clothes, more choices, more freedom — the modern middle class has all of it. The one thing a primitive chieftain has over him is the quality of the women he gets. Everything else, I will take the modern middle class.
There is a ranking even to eating well and living well.
Why put an age limit on it?
Because I don't want to fuck some middle-aged woman who still gets her period, grinding on me like hell in hopes of one last miracle.
Why give them a right of refusal?
Obviously I put that in so I wouldn't have to have sex I don't want.
Why only women who create social value?
Because if each person's share of the responsibility is small, the total amount of responsibility I have to carry will be small. What kind of lunatic wants the size of the responsibility he has to bear to balloon out of control?
Why do they need to be mature enough to take responsibility for a child?
To make sure they have the intellectual level to understand the situation and know what results their own choices will produce. I have no interest in watching some thick-skulled idiot throw a tantrum the second things get hard, screaming why do I have to do this?
Well. Hyeongcheol was the one who insisted we put that in, too.
Why discriminate and draw distinctions when it comes to marriage?
Obviously I put that in to dodge pregnancy attacks from some random bitch. What other reason would there be?
Why should they take the man's surname?
It's a mark. A sign to other men that she's mine, so keep your hands off. Why? Because in this insane world, if a woman I thought of as mine goes around spreading her legs for some other guy — two-timing me — or if some other guy starts making moves on my woman? There would be a bloodbath. I would pick up a knife and put it through his throat.
And then, instead of any sense of camaraderie among men, you would get the understanding that every other man is trash who might betray you at any moment. You would get excessive competition. You would get everything ruined. And then society would collapse.
I have no interest in becoming a primitive over something that stupid, striking flint to light a campfire.
Why no custody for divorced women?
If you recognize custody, she becomes a parent with parental rights. You become a community of fate and a community of finances all over again, the way it used to be — and then you are guaranteed a property-division lawsuit, and everything, the family and the money, gets Thanos'd out of existence. Why would I give her that?
And if it has gotten as far as divorce, she is a woman who should be discarded for certain. Now that my own value has risen this dramatically, is there any reason to hand her a right like that? We are not playing house here.
That is my real intent.
I want to enjoy pleasure without responsibility, with beautiful women who have fallen for me. And then, when I meet a woman worth keeping at my side, I want to keep her there. I want freedom over my time and my money. I want to live a life that moves by my desires alone.
Not the life of a weak man who has to compromise with his desires. The life of a strong one.
That is the true desire that shatters the mask I wear.
That is what I have endured for. That is what I have worked for. And now, at last, this enormous value I have wanted and wanted has finally come into being — and they want me to sell it off as cheap as possible?
Absolutely not.
If I have to deceive the public for this, if I have to spout fabricated nonsense instead of what I actually think, I will do it as much as it takes. With a smile. Happily. I will pour my heart into it.
Woof.
The stage, and the floor below it, went quiet. I looked at the faces of the men on the stage and in the seats beneath it, the silence hanging over all of them, and it seemed I had gotten away with it. Maybe because nothing I had said was logically contradictory. Truth be told, there hadn't been anything else to lie about anyway. If they dug any deeper, I would have nothing left to say.
"If that's your position... I think men could stand to sacrifice a little more for the world."
"What kind of sacrifice are you talking about?"
"Actively using IVF procedures and sperm-bank technology, for the problem-free survival and continuation of the human race."
"Give women more options besides applying for Duty Sex."
"I agree. I agree that IVF and sperm-bank technology are technologies that could resolve the situation we are in."
"If they were viable."
I knew this was coming. That damn sperm bank. That damn IVF.
"But just how viable is that technology, really?"
"And could just anyone receive it?"
"Do we even have the resources for that?"
"I don't believe we do."
"And who takes responsibility for raising the children born that way?"
"The government?"
"Or the woman, all by herself?"
"Children, in the end, need two parents."
"From the men's perspective it would be all too convenient. One extraction a day and you're done. But I don't believe that's how it should be."
"Besides, in a world like this one, is there really a mother who could provide a child with everything it needs, all by herself?"
"There isn't."
Give me a fucking break.
Anyway, I had no intention of going through the unpleasant experience of some woman I didn't even know carrying my child, or of doing anything that would cheapen my own value.
"What's more, among the men we have now, there are still minors."
"There's a child I'm rather fond of, actually."
"An incredibly pure, good-hearted kid."
"Even in the situation we're in now, he went and found work for himself — a part-time job at the cafe inside the Ministry of Male Family Affairs. A kid you can't help but be proud of."
"I also believe this."
"We have values we must protect — democracy, human rights, the rule of law — but protecting children like him is a value our society cannot afford to let slip away either."
"In the name of maximum efficiency, would it really be right to start extracting semen from an underage boy the moment he hits puberty?"
The truth was, IVF, sperm banks, and genetic engineering really were the methods that could solve a world like this. There was nothing I could say to logically refute it. Because it was a fact. If it were only possible.
In the present, with the remnants of the old world still lying around, a small group like the upper class could probably manage it. But as time went on, even people like that would find it impossible. And for the overwhelming majority, the people who were already worrying about their next meal, it was absolutely impossible.
And if I had argued this logically enough, I might as well stretch things a little myself. They wanted me to sacrifice more for society, in the name of being politically correct? Then I would give them politically correct bullshit right back. You fight bullshit with bullshit, don't you?
Fifteen years old. The only minor left in the Republic of Korea. Our Minseok.
Before the Cataclysm, that was an age when he should have been a second-year middle schooler, drowning in eighth-grader syndrome, out making the kind of cringey dark history you spend the rest of your life trying to bury. Instead he had been forced to grow up in a society that demanded it of him. I was sorry for that.
Minseok. Forgive your hyung.
I have no choice but to sell you out.
I'm sorry.