Bestiality and Me

The truth, straight from the horse's mouth

No, I am not pro-bestiality. I am very much against it. I always have been.

This is despite what you might well have heard.

While giving a speech against nihilism in November 2016, I went into a casual off-script tangent which at the time seemed innocuous. But it has dogged me (pun intended) ever since.

It started immediately afterwards. Renegade Broadcasting, a pair of misfits who used to revel in spreading discord, decided to extract a clip from the livestream and share it, out of context, claiming it showed that I am “pro-bestiality”. A surprising number of people fell for this.

I naively imagined that, after a few days, it would fall away and be forgotten about. The full speech was there for anyone to watch, and made it clear that I was not defending bestiality. But instead, the clip kept doing the rounds, endlessly. It still crops up even now, 7 years later. Usually it is presented to me by people who seem to know nothing else about me and demand that I explain myself. This is very tedious. I think an essay that I can simply link to will be useful.

Substack doesn’t allow embedding videos so I can’t include the clip. It doesn’t matter, though. I can simply tell you what I believe (and believed then) and you can either trust me, or frankly, you can get stuffed.

The tangent came up while I was answering the following question from a nihilistic young woman:

Why should I bother worrying about “moral” values if it doesn’t really hurt anyone else?

So as to illustrate the gravity of this question, I decided to tell my audience how far people can take it. If something is okay as long as “it doesn’t really hurt anyone else”, you will find yourself approving of a lot of very grotty stuff.

A year earlier, I had seen a man in a Facebook group asking “what is morally wrong with bestiality?” I don’t think he was a bestialist, just a clever-clogs who prided himself on being “logically consistent” and enjoyed posing this question because it illuminated problems in other people’s thinking. He proceeded to shoot down everything that was said to him, including by me.

1. The animal can’t consent.
   Animals don’t consent to most things we do with them. Besides, my pets enjoy it.

2. Regardless of how it affects the animals, it is bad for you.
   Who are you to say that? How do you know how it affects me?

3. You are doing something that is against nature.
   Everything we are inclined to do is, by definition, natural and rooted in our nature. Besides, many things we do today are an attempt to transcend nature. We are no longer bound by “natural laws” which, really, were just superstitious irrational beliefs in the first place.

4. You can’t produce offspring by doing this. That’s a sign that it is wrong.
   Infertile human couples can’t produce offspring either. Is it wrong for them to have sex?

5. Virtually everyone else is disgusted by this. Doesn’t that suggest to you that you’ve gone down a dark path?
   Other people are irrational and stupid.

6. By doing this, you are detaching yourself from the rest of humanity.
   No I’m not.

7. By doing, this you are degrading yourself.

   What does “degrade” mean?

8. You cannot have a strong emotional connection with an animal, strong enough to warrant this.

   Yes I can. Besides, people often have sex with each other without there being any emotional connection at all.

9. Risk of STDs, etc.
   I use a condom.

Etc…

I was so disturbed by this that I made a video, Bestiality and Oblivion.

In it, I examined the horror that something can be clearly bad, perverse, unhealthy and degenerate, yet you can’t definitively argue against it and thus dissuade people from doing it. Since (as just shown) people can refute any moral arguments they want, the only way to stop them is to have an over-arching transcendent ethical system. This would probably be either a religion or an absolutist political doctrine. Without one of those two things, morality is basically a free-for-all, despite our hopes to the contrary. This realisation rather horrified me.

Once I published that video in October 2015, it attracted the attention of someone who engaged me in the comments. A self-described “zoophile”, he seemed to trawl YouTube for videos discussing his pet (ahem) topic and take each YouTuber to task. As we exchanged comments, I realised that he was not speaking hypothetically like the guy on Facebook, but that he actually did have sex with his pets. I was shocked but, again, he had an answer for everything. He had worked out how to refute all the moral objections to his perversion.

Concluding sorrowfully that this topic was a bit of a hopeless case, I didn’t mention bestiality again… until the speech in November 2016.

The history above is unknown to people who share the clip around today (or even immediately, in 2016) but hopefully it explains why I made the tangent there which so enthralls them. I was not speaking from a position of approving of bestiality. I was describing the very real problem that, as civilisation declines and its metaphysics lose hold, people will begin to engage in whatever behaviours they want. Expediency, pleasure, curiosity, decadence, sadism… there is no way to save people from their whims unless God, or the Emperor, or the Führer, simply forbid certain things in the name of goodness and eternity.

Though it is certainly relevant to the topic of nihilism, was it wise of me to make a tangent about bestiality during the speech? Clearly not. It was surplus to requirements but, moreover, it was bad taste and icky. The audience were visibly discomfited. That is why I moved on from it quickly. But this in turn meant that the tangent had only “incriminating” stuff; there was no elaboration specifically about bestiality that would clarify my position on it. I presumed the next bit of the script would do that anyway:

Moral codes identify not only behaviours that are actively harmful to people, but also behaviours that are “passively harmful”. The consequences of such actions are not immediately detrimental, but their cumulative effect is to degrade the soul, shrivel the spirit, weaken the will, and poison the mind.

Of course, the clip that is shared around never includes the above, even though it comes immediately after the “incriminating” stuff. If it were, I don’t think any of the hubbub would have occurred; with the context, people would understand the true meaning of words which, isolated, seem incriminating.

Obviously, it would have been better had I simply never gone into the tangent at all. It gave morons a way to attack me and mislead many other people.

Everything else I have said in my 10 years of content creation should assure people that I am opposed to something as grotesque as bestiality. But if people are unfamiliar with my work, or if they dislike me personally, they can share that clip around and cause some outrage/amusement at my expense. It’s my own fault, of course - but the mistake was an innocent one.

I think what also deceives people is my intonation during the speech. This I can blame at least partly on two Xanax tablets I had taken just before stepping up to the podium. (I was about to address an audience of 200 people in a very fancy venue, so I was nervous.) The result was a slightly spaced-out way of speaking which irritates me to this day. Other than that, and the tangent, it was one of my best speeches.

I think another thing is my use of the word “fascinate”. Yes, this specific problem regarding bestiality did fascinate me, because it seemed so critical to a functional society and to general wellbeing. It still seems critical now, but it no longer fascinates me; eventually I concluded that sometimes you should just ignore the bad and focus on the good. The bad poisons you while the good nourishes you, and in any case we should not be surprised by the former (it always persists) while we should never take the latter for granted (it suffers by our neglect). To focus too much on the darkness is in a sense to let the world be ravaged by it - or at least, our own interior world.

It is ironic that someone whose main bugbear is nihilism, especially moral nihilism, should be accused of that very thing. I used to assume that people who share that clip around are ill-intentioned, like the trailer trash of Renegade Broadcasting, but it is possible they are good people who have simply been mis-led into undermining their own movement by attacking one of its prominent figures. Feds use such tricks, almost as much as misfits and sociopaths do. It is, as ever, impossible to distinguish feds from the people maladjusted or stupid enough to do the very things that feds do.

If you ever see people spreading that clip around, or the allegation, please do not trouble yourself to explain on my behalf; simply link them to this essay.

Thank you.