Prokofy Neva and the case of the elusive Principle: Or, the anti-conceptual mind

A principle is “a fundamental, primary, or general truth, on which other truths depend.” Thus a principle is an abstraction which subsumes a great number of concretes. It is only by means of principles that one can set one’s long-range goals and evaluate the concrete alternatives of any given moment. It is only principles that enable a man to plan his future and to achieve it.

– Ayn Rand, “The Anatomy of Compromise,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 144.

Concrete problems cannot even be grasped, let alone judged or solved, without reference to abstract principles.

-Ayn Rand,“Credibility and Polarization,” The Ayn Rand Letter, I, 1, 3

I. The Neva Experience

It has been said that Prokofy Neva is not an actual person, but an experience one must undergo at some point in life – like listening to a Florence Foster Jenkins recording, or walking through Alphabet Town in the Big Apple at midnight whilst bedecked with your family jewels. It is, like the other two examples, an experience one is not likely to forget for some time.

My initiation into the Neva universe involved a press conference that Linden Lab employees held at PR Island. This conference encompassed the new Adult Content policies to be enacted by the company in the future, and its many different aspects of verifying the age of users who will be accessing content marked as adult. Naturally, this led me to ask one question:  ” Since the new system verifies accounts as adults, are child avatars in adult areas still subject to the same rules as before, now that the user can be verified as an adult? Can child avatars visit adult regions?”

The reasoning behind this question might seem obscure, but it wasn’t: since it could be verified that all participants were, in fact, adults, then there seemed little reason to castigate individuals who engaged in adult activities under those guises. The official reply came that there would be no change in their policy regarding adult ageplay, and I made the mistake of sharing my observations with Prokofy Neva who – and this should have been a sign – was present and equipped  in  garlic, crucifix, anti-toxic pack, combat boots, latex gloves and a welder’s mask which he later removed because ‘he couldn’t see’

What followed was an imprecation of near-Goethian proportions (by way of Woody Allen) in which the aforementioned individual accused me of attempting to ‘undermine legality’, promoting  ‘desensitizing activities’  and of apparently leading a campaign in favor of child pornography. This not being enough, Neva proved himself  impervious to reason and has now apparently denounced me to the four winds of the internet as a ‘creep’, a ‘legalist’ (a tall order indeed from the individual who sued a writer for claiming that he was no longer effecting change in the world) a ‘literalist’ and finally, as the summit of a tourtous path of thinking that would have made Miss Havisham of Dicken’s “Great Expectations” bow down before the presence of a master, she called me an apologist for paedophilia.

This is the closest one can become to Baptism By Fire, when one talks about joining the ranks of the Post-Nevan Initiates. Spellbound by what seemed to me a mind constantly wandering but which had forgotten that important piece of advice about the tether, I conducted a little bit of research into the nature of this beast which, like Aelian’s monoceros,  seemed to be comprised of such discordancy that one had to wonder how it did not simply fall apart. My research yielded a valuable piece of information: coming upon several of Neva’s writings, I found out that he was both an alleged defendant of Free Speech while at the same time an ardent proponent of the excision of any and all adult content from Second Life. I had had before me what Ayn Rand once called an anti-conceptual mind.

II. The Anti-Conceptual Mind

The anti-conceptual mind is a mind which can, and often does, hold two or more conflicting beliefs without any distress because its user is a person who is unwilling or incapable of acknowledging that behind every concrete action or policy there is an abstraction that subsumes them, a fundamental principle.  These anti-conceptual minds will not therefore think in matters of principle, but will instead find themselves hopelessly bound by concretes in such a way that to them each concrete is a unique phenomenon, unrelated to others because it cannot distinguish the links that one usually establishes in the stages of concept formation.

It is not uncommon for people of Neva’s qualities to believe that one is not being contradictory by championing freedom of speech and anti-pornography agendas, or to believe that being superstitious and rational are not contradictory. No finer example can be found than the man a young objectivist once found who was lobbying for the nationalization of the steel industry. After a long and erudite debate between the two, the young objectivist got the older man to see that nationalizing the steel industry was morally wrong. “All right, then,” the older man went on to say “but what about the coal industry?”  As it is evident, the older man could not understand that there was an underlying principle at work.

III. The Principle Of It All

Prokofy Neva is, in himself, an unimportant individual to me. The relevance of someone so immersed in his own anti-intellectual fog to my own life is actually pretty negligible, but the reason why he is the focus of the initial part of my post is because I have seldom met people who so personified this particular mentality. That, and he seems to have acquired a certain level of legendary status with his anti-conceptual antics, therefore my reader will most likely be familiar with him, if they have been involved in Second Life’s issues. This familiarity helps me illustrate my points.

First of all, I am not an apologist for paedophilia. In fact, I publicly have stated that I condemn the act itself as much as one would condemn rape. As an objectivist I consider them both to be moral crimes: rape is the violation of another’s person’s self esteem through the use of force, and paedophilia is a violation of a child’s ability to develop into a normal person. They are both also a violation of individual rights, since they both occur through the imposition of force (be it physical force in rape, or psychological force as in some cases of child abuse). To me these two crimes are very concise concerning the nature of their transgression. Unlike the anti-conceptualists, I do not consider them to be ‘abhorrent’ ‘unthinkable’, or ‘beyond words.’ The crimes are horrible, but no evil is beyond quantification, and trying to turn one crime into an unquantifiable, mythical horror is, in essence, giving it power.

It is precisely this kind of myth-making that has brought about the current series of events. Linden Labs, in response to many clients – many of them sharing in Neva’s qualities – has forged a policy which frowns, unconditionally, upon anyone engaging in sexual acts whilst wearing an avatar that bears the appearance of a child.

IV. Where Is The Child?

Now, looking at the situation calmly, it is hardly Linden Lab’s fault if the decisions they must make to appease their clients seem illogical — when the client-base itself is populated by a large number of irrationalists. As a business, they’re trying to survive.  As a private business, they have the absolute right to dispose of content they do not desire – there is no question about that, and anyone who cries “censorship” misses the point. The issue, in itself, must go back to principle. More specifically, the principle needs to be analyzed by the following questions:

1. Can a crime remain a crime when the victim is fictitious?

Logically, we have to answer that no,  a fictitious victim indicates a fictitious crime.  Metaphysically and Epistemologically, we have to recognize a separation between fiction and reality.

2. Does an adult who wears the guise of a child become a child?

No. He cannot for the very same reason that children who play dress-up with their parents’ clothes are still treated as children: their appearance is irrelevant when considering the basic nature of the entity. Adults and Children have developmental, physical, psychological and emotional differences that cannot simply be overtaken by putting on lipsticks or a diaper.

We can stop there for the moment and consider the implications of the answers to 1 and 2.

V. Ceci N’est Pas Un Enfant

Putting the situation into the perspective of these answers, we can now appraise that Linden Labs has enacted a policy targeted to punish adults having mutual consensual imaginary sex, in order to stop protests against having sex with children.

Or, to put it another way,

It is an offense (to the TOS, not legal) to have sex while wearing a particular item of clothing (that is, in essence, what most avatars are) because it resembles something.

The core of the matter, then, is this: there is no child. The anti-conceptual mentality cannot understand this. To Neva, I cited that the logical conclusion of his line of thinking would be to ban all animal and furry avatars, because simulated sex with them is bestiality (they look like animals), and that anyone engaging in sexual activity with elves, fairies, nypmhs and similar mythical beasts should be sent to a mental rehabilitation ward, as these creatures do not exist.

The reply was, of course, dismissive. He treated each of the examples I mentioned as a separate entity (which he dismissed, while at the same time elevating pedophilia – or its make believe equivalent – to the unquantifiable horror) , instead of establishing a conceptual link and recognizing that none of these acts were, in fact, real.

The famous surrealist painter Renee Magritte once made a painting of a smoking pipe which he quaintly labeled “Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe”, “This Is Not A Pipe.” This puzzled many an art patron because, after all, it was clearly a pipe there on the canvas. This is a sad case of a surrealist having a stronger grasp on reality than anyone else, for indeed Magritte was right: there on the canvas was not a pipe, but in fact there was a depiction of a pipe (earlier in art history Manet had gotten into trouble because he wanted to drop the pretense that the canvas was a window into a tridimensional world, with equal controversy).

Again the ghost of Magritte must rise to point the finger at the very firm line that separates fiction and fantasy by pointing out that something bearing the appearance of a thing is not enough to grant it the nature of the thing. A mannequin can eventually be constructed to appear remarkably like a human being (and in the future, I imagine, some will be nearly indistinguishable at first sight), but it lacks all of the essential attributes that make up the nature of a human. Shape and appearance in themselves cannot convey these.

The appearance of murder on the stage or screen does not, in fact, indicate that a murder has just been comitted – if someone behaved, upon witnessing  a theatrical murder, as if a murder had indeed been comitted, the natural reaction would be to think of that person as insane because of an inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Why is it, then, that everyone is afraid to apply a similar judgment to those who cannot understand that  the appearance of a child and the mannerisms of a child do not a child make?  There is surely an insidious kind of madness afoot when the appearance of things becomes far more important than the reality of things.

VI. It’s True Because I Feel It Is!

Instead of a rational argument, they hold onto strange, visceral pleas. It is clear that the thought of an adult having sex with a child disturbs these individuals – who wouldn’t be disturbed? – but the waters become murky when these individuals are incapable of distinguishing between thought and action, simulation and reality. To justify their emotional stances, they say that, for example, simulated sex of this kind is nothing more than a ‘desensitizing activity’ and therefore it is evil because it renders the individual less sensitive to an event. There are many problems with this approach, but I’ll speak of the most important one:
Taken far enough, everything in life is a desensitizing activity: losing a relative desensitizes you to grief and death, having an unsuccessful relationship desensitizes you towards infatuation, having constant sex desensitizes you to the point that it is clinically proven that you will never have an experience on the same level as your first orgasm. The straw man arguments that try to create a moral scare by pointing to ‘desensitizing activities’ are irrelevant, because they argue that man is nothing more than a helpless create who must do what his environment commands him to do through input alone. The entire aspects of morality and volition are thrown out of the window- because they HAVE to be, otherwise their argument couldn’t hold any water. Take note, it should say a LOT about the level of negation of reality that these individuals resort to that, in order for their arguments to be effective, they have to deny man’s mind in favor of painting him as a sort of entity chained to a lab table, reacting only when a certain electrical input passes through his body.

Analyze that and ask yourself: is this actually the reality of a human being? No, it is not! This kind of argument is employed quite regularly– we’ve heard it used against video-games by parents who refuse to acknowledge that they have more influence over their childrens’ morality than a simulation, but it goes further back than that, such as the time when Goethe published his novel, the “Sorrows of Young Werther”, which was followed by many copycat suicides.  There are individuals for whom certain activities are ‘triggers’, but the fault does not lie in those activities, but rather the problem is found deep within the individual’s mind as either: a) Rampant insanity or b) Deep neurological problems. These individuals are an exception, as they are anomalies, and -on principle alone- you cannot use them as the measuring tool by which all of humanity is measured. For, if you are going to base the rules of the world on an insane asylum, you might as well abandon all logic and check  yourself in as the newest inmate.

VII. We’re All Mad Here

Prokofy Neva and thousands like him would, in fact, like to turn the world into such an asylum. It is telling of individuals of that mentality that they are always in favor of policies or regimes that espouse one or another variation of the Thought Police approach. Freedom of Speech in their vocabulary means Freedom Of Saying What I’ll Let You Say. You will find anti-conceptualists working on both sides of the spectrum: as secularists they are the Communists who outlawed religion and all independent thought, and as ecclesiastics they are the Inquisition who punished and killed men for thinking in ways they didn’t like, and the regimes of Islamic countries that will put a price on your head for writing a book (if you don’t get the reference, I am speaking of Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses”).

They are the false advocates of Freedom of Speech, advocating instead Freedom of Comfort (do what you want  as long as you don’t make me uncomfortable). A true approach to freedom of speech in this situation is as follows:

-No logical reason to outlaw pornography. If you don’t like it, don’t engage in it or look for it (this does not include child pornography, which is a violation on the same level as pedophilia, since the nature of the child makes him a non-independent being in the process of growth, who cannot defend himself and who cannot grasp the ramifications of such an act to the level that a consensual approach is required.)

-No logical reason to protest against simulated sex of two adults in the guise of children (and ficticious children, for if they impersonate a real child then there is an immediate link to reality, and that is child pornography.) They are not real children, and as much as we may find the idea of what it represents distasteful, you cannot honestly punish it without also punishing depictions of anything else you might find distasteful – and yes, that includes things such as banning Hamlet (murder and suicide),  the opera Tosca (cold-blooded murder), most Greek Mythology (incest in various forms… and many other things) and that summer action movie you liked so much (even if it is Cyrano de Bergerac with Gerard DePardieu in it).

This is how you can apply a litmus test to find out whether your ideas – or someone else’s- are anti-conceptual or not. When faced with such a case, ask the following:

1. What individual rights are being violated by this particular action?

2. What use of force is being implemented here against the will of an individual?

3.  Are the executants adults and consensual?

If the answers to 1 and 2 are “None”, and 3 comes up a resounding “Yes,” then you have no business interfering there. It is commendable that you wish to end child pornography – it is a noble cause, no-one would deny that, but instead of being an anti-conceptual Don Quixote and wasting everyone’s time by battling windmills instead of giants, be a Scaramouche and know who your real enemy is instead of attacking paintings that look like him.

Goodnight, and Good premises to all,

Kain Scalia

~ by kainscalia on May 4, 2009.