Episode 10: Fighting for the Three — Moral Vampires, Impossible Ethics & the Myth of Good Guys

There is a version of the vampire that stopped being a monster somewhere in the last century and started being a mirror. Not the thing out there you drive a stake through — the thing in here that has to take something from someone in order to keep going. That's the whole episode. The card just got there first.

Matt showed up in a black shirt, dark nails, hair slicked back, holding an Edgar Allan Poe mug, and said he'd been drawn to dark things all day. Jaye Anne clocked it immediately. The deck came out — a deck he's used maybe three times, rediscovered because he redid the closet and can finally see what he owns — and the Knight of Swords landed: a vampire warrior mid-leap, blades already thrown. Direct, intense, impulsive. They act first and ask questions later, or never.

Then the guidebook — the Codex, which Matt would like to bring back as a word — hands over the real subject. Pagan author and journalist Margot Adler studied vampire fiction and named the modern ones moral vampires: powerful creatures struggling desperately to do what is right. And the passage that stopped him cold: that description holds up a dark mirror to modern human beings. We have wondrous technology paid for by draining the planet and the people at the bottom of it. The vampire has to do the same thing, constantly, or cease to exist. We just do it slowly enough to not feel it.

From there it gets tangled, which is the point. Every ethical exit is also a door onto someone else's harm.

In this episode

• Ten episodes into a show that wasn't an idea in January — and nobody on this call has mowed a lawn this century
• Y2K nostalgia as a diagnostic: no data centers in the eighties, one Apple II in the corner of the office, and neon on every Kmart
• "Adulting is an outfit I put on" — being good at things you actively dislike
• The Tarot of the Vampires arrives, and the Knight of Swords with it
• Margot Adler's moral vampire, and the dark mirror it holds up
• Kill Amazon: a thought experiment that eats its own tail, then does it again with return-to-office and converted real estate
• A Civil War reenactment where a seven-year-old asks who the good guys are and gets the wrong answer, confidently
• The evangelism class, and a testimony that only works below the Mason-Dixon line
• Inconsistent ethics — everyone has them, including whoever is currently invoking theirs at you
• Punitive versus restorative, and why sometimes you don't want to restore anybody
• Mystic South, the pull toward something older, and conjure's Bible as the primary spell book
• The Buddhabrot, sacred geometry, and the line between "everything is connected" and homogenizing someone else's tradition
• The rabbis, the midrash, and the permission to never resolve the tension
• A pendant that says warrior in ancient Irish, and the archetype Matt spent years trying to push away

Lines that landed

• That description holds up a dark mirror to modern human beings. — Matt
• We are consuming the lifeblood of the planet, but we're doing it so slowly we can't tell that we're bleeding it to death. — Matt
• Sometimes you're the one providing the blood and sometimes you're the one consuming the blood. And sometimes you're both. — Matt
• Sometimes you suck your own blood. — Jaye Anne
• The only thing that is absolutely constant is the fact that nothing is absolutely constant. — Matt
• Maybe I'm the bad guy. Why would I be the bad guy? How would I grapple with this? And sort of humanizing that monster — I think that's integration. — Jaye Anne
• The anti-hero is in here. — Matt
• Good people do bad things and bad people can do good things and it's really hard to know for sure what you're dealing with. — Jaye Anne
• I'm gonna air quotes every single time I say right or wrong on this show. — Matt
• When I run away, the people I don't like always win. — Matt
• I don't see a lot of people who are fighting for anything like the third alternative. A lot of people fighting for the one and the two. Not a lot of people fighting for the three. — Matt
• The integration. — Jaye Anne

Referenced

• Tarot of the Vampires — Charles Harrington, illustrated by Craig Maher; guidebook Codex of the Vampires
• Margot Adler — pagan author and journalist, her study of vampire fiction and the "moral vampire"
• Interview with the Vampire / The Vampire Chronicles, Dark Shadows, Buffy, True Blood, Twilight — the tormented-hero lineage
• Breaking Bad — Walter White's wardrobe going dark as he does

* The Buddhabrot — the fractal set whose forms echo Buddhist, Christian, Celtic and Indian sacred art

• Mystic South — and the turn toward ancestral, conjure and folk-magic material
• Midrash — the rabbinic practice of asking without resolving
• Savannah: the oldest Torah scroll in the United States, afternoon squalls, and a little fan that keeps the flies off

What we left unresolved

Basically everything, on purpose. Whether there is any such thing as an ethical choice once you follow the consequences far enough. Whether "everything is archetypally connected" is an insight or just what white people do to indigenous traditions. Whether the third alternative is a real position or just a way of refusing the first two. Matt: all I can think about most of the time is that there is no answer. Jaye Anne, on the Buddhabrot: you can't fully define it. You can't put it in a box.

The show is the asking. The card just showed up dressed for it.

Chapters

1. 0:00 (YouTube · Spotify) — Ten episodes in, still figuring it out
2. 3:02 (YouTube · Spotify) — The eighties were not twenty years ago
3. 6:23 (YouTube · Spotify) — Adulting is an outfit I put on
4. 7:20 (YouTube · Spotify) — Pulling from the Tarot of the Vampires
5. 17:34 (YouTube · Spotify) — The Knight of Swords: direct, intense, impulsive
6. 20:41 (YouTube · Spotify) — The vampire as tormented hero
7. 22:03 (YouTube · Spotify) — A dark mirror to modern human beings
8. 25:08 (YouTube · Spotify) — Kill Amazon and see what happens
9. 30:38 (YouTube · Spotify) — Ethics is not easy — it might be impossible
10. 35:27 (YouTube · Spotify) — Who are the good guys?
11. 45:22 (YouTube · Spotify) — I have inconsistent ethics. So do you.
12. 50:06 (YouTube · Spotify) — Mystic South, conjure, and the Bible as spell book
13. 59:00 (YouTube · Spotify) — The rabbis never resolve the midrash
14. 72:30 (YouTube · Spotify) — The warrior I tried to push away
15. 73:52 (YouTube · Spotify) — Fighting for the three

~1h16 · One moment: Matt pulling a pendant toward the camera — ohm on one side, warrior in ancient Irish on the other — to explain the part of himself he spent years trying to put down.