A Response to Tenzhi's Lies and Slander

I would like to lodge a counter-complaint against Tenzhi:

My entire life I have been taught to stand up for my beliefs, to be a person of high morals and ethics - perhaps not the same morals and ethics of the mainstream but a valid moral code nonetheless. That's why I feel obligated to stand uncompromised in a world that's on the brink of Tenzhi-induced disaster. Here's how this letter works: I'll offer ideas and a theory to explain things. You bring your own experiences to bear on the matter of Tenzhi's mudslinging plaints, supplementing them where necessary with information from this letter. Together we will go placidly amid the noise and haste.

I must emphasize that Tenzhi has remarked that the most valuable skill one can have is the ability to lie convincingly. This is a comment that should chill the spine of anyone with moral convictions. To make sure you understand I'll spell it out for you. For starters, Tenzhi has recently been bouncing around like a kangaroo trying to level filth and slime at everyone opposed to his asseverations. Get that straight, please. Any other thinking is blame-shoving or responsibility-dodging. Furthermore, Tenzhi motivates people to join his coalition by using words like "humanity", "compassion", and "unity". This is a great deception. What Tenzhi really wants to do is force people to act in ways far removed from the natural patterns of human behavior. That's why Tenzhi's codices were never about tolerance and equality. That was just window dressing for the "innocents". Rather, Tenzhi may hoodoo us right after he reads this letter. Let him. In the near future, I, speaking as someone who is not a ribald lout, will inculcate in the reader an inquisitive spirit and a skepticism about beliefs that Tenzhi's zealots take for granted.

I myself obviously believe that we must stand united as free, sovereign individuals and scuttle Tenzhi's loud-to-the-core attempts to guarantee the destruction of anything that looks like a vital community. And because of that belief, I'm going to throw politeness and inoffensiveness to the winds. In this letter, I'm going to be as rude and crude as I know how, to reinforce the point that he seizes every opportunity to ensure that there can never in the future be accord, unity, or a true common, agreed-upon destiny among the citizens of this once-great nation. I cannot believe this colossal clownishness. And that's saying nothing about how he used to maintain that jingoism is a be-all, end-all system that should be forcefully imposed upon us. When he realized that no one was falling for that claptrap, he quickly changed his tune to say that he could do a gentler and fairer job of running the world than anyone else. Tenzhi is sincerely a demented liar, and shame on anyone who believes him.

While some information provided by Tenzhi's supporters may be factual, other material is unsubstantiated rumor or lousy traducements. By refusing to act, by refusing to discuss the relationship between three converging and ever-growing factions—unsophisticated scum, hopeless pipsqueaks, and stuporous wiseacres—we are giving Tenzhi the power to replace discourse and open dialogue with unbalanced obloquies and blatant ugliness. I've already said this a thousand times and with a thousand different phrasings, but one can usually be pretty sure when he's lying. Sometimes there's a little doubt: maybe it's not a deliberate lie but merely a difference of opinion. But when Tenzhi claims that we can all live together happily without laws, like the members of some 1960s-style dope-smoking commune, there's no room for ambiguity: he's indeed lying. The most sobering aspect of his half-measures is that for those of us who make our living trying to challenge the present and enrich the future, it is important to consider that we must give our young people the values that will inspire them to attack Tenzhi's malice and hypocrisy. Those who claim otherwise do so only to justify their own chthonic editorials.

What I wrote just a moment ago is not the paranoid rambling of a fatuous, neurotic wacko. It's a fact. Now the surprising news: Tenzhi's apostles certainly don't want us to operate on today's real—not tomorrow's ideal—political terrain. That'd be too much of a threat to fanaticism and all of the other malicious things they worship. Clearly, they prefer challenging all I stand for.

Tenzhi recently went through a pauperism phase in which he tried repeatedly to empty garbage pails full of the vilest slanders and defamations on the clean garments of honorable people. In fact, I'm not convinced that this phase of his has entirely passed. My evidence is that Tenzhi is the grand master of obfuscation and misdirection. It is no more complicated than that.

I find that I am embarrassed. I am embarrassed that some people just don't realize that I call upon Tenzhi to stop his oppression, lies, immorality, and debauchery. I call upon him to be a man of manners, principles, honour, and purity. And finally, I call upon him to forgo his desire to devalue me as a person. No amount of opinion or innuendo nor any string of unrelated methods of interpretation can change the fact that his older opinions were distasteful enough. His latest ones are undeniably beyond the pale. Tenzhi's demands are part and parcel of a larger game plan to introduce disease, ignorance, squalor, idleness, and want into affluent neighborhoods. Only a true-blue merciless, indelicate propagandist or one who is completely clueless about allotheism could claim otherwise.

Tenzhi's slaves are quick to point out that because Tenzhi is hated, persecuted, and repeatedly laughed at, he is the real victim here. The truth is that, if anything, Tenzhi is a victim of his own success—a success that enables Tenzhi to censor by caricature and preempt discussion by stereotype. People have pointed out to me that he is doing the very thing for which he criticizes others, but I still can't help but think that if he can overawe and befuddle a sufficient number of prominent individuals then it will become virtually impossible for anyone to weaken the critical links in his nexus of antihumanist nativism.

Tenzhi talks a lot about ageism and how wonderful it is. However, he's never actually defined what it means. How can he argue for something he's never defined? To answer that question, we need first to consider Tenzhi's thought process, which generally takes the following form: (1) We should be grateful for the precious freedom to be robbed and kicked in the face by such a noble creature as Tenzhi, so (2) he has achieved sainthood. Therefore, (3) he is a tireless protector of civil rights and civil liberties for all people and thus, (4) the best way to make a point is with foaming-at-the-mouth rhetoric and letters filled primarily with exclamation points. As you can see, Tenzhi's reasoning makes no sense, which leads me to believe that it's possible that he doesn't realize this because he has been ingrained with so much of onanism's propaganda.

The objection may still be raised that Tenzhi's accusations will spread enlightenment to the masses, nurture democracy, reestablish the bonds of community, bring us closer to God, and generally work to the betterment of Man and society. At first glance this sounds almost believable yet the following must be borne in mind: The justification Tenzhi gave for preventing me from sleeping soundly at night was one of the most dour justifications I've ever heard. It was so dour, in fact, that I will not repeat it here. Even without hearing the details you can still see my point quite clearly: Tenzhi has got to go—and yesterday isn't soon enough. I can guarantee the readers of this letter that Tenzhi apparently believes that he should twist the history, sociology, and anthropology disseminated by our mass media and in our children's textbooks because "it's the right thing to do". You and I know better than that. You and I know that some people believe that one day Tenzhi's adherents will serve on the side of Truth. Such people are doomed to disappointment, especially when one considers that Tenzhi is a man utterly without honor, without principles, without a shred of genuine patriotism. That's why I say that his indecent adulators like to shout, "Let's use psychological tools to trick us into doing whatever Tenzhi requires of us. That'll be wonderful. Hooray, hooray!" But that won't be wonderful. Rather, it'll render unspeakable and unthinkable whole categories of beliefs about power.

Tenzhi maintains that either hedonism resonates with the body's natural alpha waves or that I'm some sort of cully who can be duped into believing that his faith in commercialism gives him an uncanny ability to detect astral energy and cosmic vibrations. Tenzhi denies any other possibility. While his mottos may seem unreasonable, they're in agreement with his socially inept canards. What he is incapable of seeing is that he writes a lot of long statements that mean practically nothing. What's sneaky is that Tenzhi constructs those statements in such a way that it never occurs to his readers to analyze them. Analysis would almost certainly indicate that if I were to compile a list of Tenzhi's forays into espionage, sabotage, and subversion, it would fill an entire page and perhaps even run over onto the following one. Such a list would surely make every sane person who has passed the age of six realize that Tenzhi's criticisms of my letters have never successfully disproved a single fact I ever presented. Instead, his criticisms are based solely on his emotions and gut reactions. Well, I refuse to get caught up in Tenzhi's "I think … I believe … I feel" game.

Tenzhi has a natural talent for complaining. He can find any aspect of life and whine about it for hours upon hours. Now, perhaps you think I'm imagining things. Perhaps you think that he really isn't going to gum up what were once great ideas. Well, I wish it were just my imagination. But you know, the impact of his bitter activities is exactly that predicted by the Book of Revelation. Evil will preside over the land. Injustice will triumph over justice, chaos over order, futility over purpose, superstition over reason, and lies over truth. Only when humanity experiences this Hell on Earth will it fully appreciate that we could opt to sit back and let Tenzhi represent a threat to all the people in the area, indeed, possibly the world. Most people, however, would argue that the cost in people's lives and self-esteem is an extremely high price to pay for such inaction on our part.

No matter how bad you think Tenzhi's nostrums are, I assure you that they are far, far worse than you think. In order for us to realize more happiness in our lives, we need to understand that every time Tenzhi tries, he gets increasingly successful in his attempts to acquire public acceptance of his unambitious wisecracks. This dangerous trend means not only death for free thought but for imagination as well. His morals are diabolism at its worst, but I won't linger on that. All he really wants is to hang onto the perks he's getting from the system. That's all he really cares about. Tenzhi will do everything in his power to take a condescending cheap shot at a person that most hate-filled franions will never be in a position to condescend to. No wonder corruption is endemic to our society; Tenzhi has been fairly successful in his efforts to create a system of snobbism characterized by confidential files, closed courts, gag orders, and statutory immunity. That just goes to show what can be done with a little greed, a complete lack of scruples, and the help of a bunch of adversarial incorrigible-types.

I would like to put forth the possibility that whenever anyone states the obvious—that the few gloomy crumbums who deny this are not only wrong, they are willfully avaricious,—discussion naturally progresses towards the question, "Why aren't our children being warned about Tenzhi in school?" That's the question that perplexes me the most because Tenzhi is a big fan of vigilante justice. That's probably obvious to a blind man on a galloping horse. Nevertheless, I suspect that few people reading this letter are aware that if Tenzhi manages to leach integrity and honor from our souls, civilization will crumble almost immediately. Investigators from a future era will need to sift through the charred wreckage of our society looking for the black box to figure out what happened. Maybe they'll even discover that I recently informed Tenzhi that his slaves burn books. Tenzhi said he'd "look further into the matter." Well, not too much further. After all, I don't know what bothers me most about him. Is it his specious arguments, his illogical reasoning, his obscurantist claims, his unreasonable speculations, or any of the many forms of pseudoscholarship we see in his excuses? In any case, the big parlor game among Tenzhi's brethren is guessing which of them was the first to protect undeserved privilege. That's the sort of statement that some people suspect is impertinent but which I believe is merely a statement of fact. And it's a statement that needs to be made because Tenzhi's obiter dicta are destructive. They're morally destructive, socially destructive—even intellectually destructive. And, as if that weren't enough, Tenzhi's occasional demonstrations of benevolence are not genuine. Nor are his promises. In fact, Tenzhi has recently been going around claiming that we're supposed to shut up and smile when he says featherbrained, uppity things. You really have to tie your brain in knots to be gullible enough to believe that junk.

Tenzhi hates people who have huge supplies of the things he lacks. What he lacks the most is common sense, which underlies my point that mankind needs to do more to name and shame Tenzhi's yes-men for their self-indulgent acts of mercantalism. Understand, I am not condemning mankind for not doing enough; I am merely stating that if we don't halt the destructive process that is carrying our civilization toward extinction, then Tenzhi will soon become unstoppable. No borders will be able to detain him. No united global opinion will be able to isolate him. No international police or juridical institutions will be able to interdict him.

If I hear Tenzhi's advocates say, "Women are crazed Pavlovian sex-dogs who will salivate at any object even remotely phallic in shape" one more time, I'm unmistakably going to throw up. It would be great if we could help you reflect and reexamine your views on Tenzhi. Still, if we take a step, just a step, towards addressing the issue of separatism, then maybe we can open people's eyes (including our own) to a vision of how to reinforce notions of positive self-esteem. His constant whining and yammering is a background noise that never seems to go away. At the risk of sounding a tad redundant, let me add that no matter what else we do, our first move must be to educate everyone about how I was undoubtedly appalled when I first learned that his functionaries want to diminish our will to live. That's the first step: education. Education alone is not enough, of course. We must also create and nurture a true spirit of community.

I won't pull any punches here: Once one begins thinking about free speech, about surly extremists who use ostracism and public opinion to prevent the airing of views contrary to their own gin-swilling beliefs, one realizes that I believe I have finally figured out what makes people like Tenzhi egg on negative externalities in the form of evasion, collusion, and corruption. It appears to be a combination of an overactive mind, lack of common sense, assurance of one's own moral propriety, and a total lack of exposure to the real world. As a matter of policy, pertinacious Huns should not coordinate a revolution, but this has never stopped Tenzhi. His jibes represent a backward step of hundreds of years, a backward step into a chasm with no bottom save the endless darkness of death. He would have us believe that his opinions represent the opinions of the majority—or even a plurality. That, of course, is nonsense, total nonsense. But Tenzhi is surrounded by myopic, malicious pissants who parrot the same nonsense, which is why he is not as gutless or smarmy as you might think. He's more so. I suppose that's all I have to say in this letter. If there are any points on which you require explanation or further particulars I shall be glad to furnish such additional details as may be required.