Hi Yotam. We have to kick off this blog somehow, so here’s a little essay I wrote. It’s a convolutedly Quaker essay, I think, in the sense that it exists in my mind within a Quaker discourse. The topic, essentially, is to define the brand of pacifism that I actually believe in. Here is my attempt:

In Defense of Destruction

September 15th, 2026

Sometimes, I take great joy in seeing my art get destroyed. It gives me pleasure to watch the process, smiling voyeuristically from the side as my friend’s infant son scribbles nonsense gobbledigook nothing upon a week’s worth of meticulous handiwork. It’s the feeling of a mandala being destroyed, except that the destruction is not a clean erasure but a work of simple and arbitrary violence; like a sword drawing a wound upon perfectly smooth skin, but without any great whoosh or Kurosawan blood spray. This is pleasurable, very pleasurable, sometimes to an unrivalled extent. I love to see my creations get hurt in this way, knowing they have no consciousness to feel any hurt by, except perhaps in a facile panpsychist way. It’s not that I see no soul in my artwork— in fact there’s a great deal of spirit in it, but the very desecration of the body that holds the spirit seems to strengthen the latter. The platonic thing that lived in my mind– very comfortably I should say– until I desecrated it by making it material, returns once more to the cozy upper realm of the spiritual.

When an artwork is destroyed, my friends invariably begin to worship it. This is familiar behavior; it is the way we worship a good guy who killed himself, and bewail how lovely the thing was before its destruction. We don’t do this for the living, of course; no one especially cared for the breathing Juniper Blessing and fewer still gave her compliments. So my friends tell me: “I really wish you had the version that Doydek didn’t ruin,” and I think to myself: Doydek didn’t ruin it, he made it perfect. But of course I say instead, “well, you know, all things are temporary,” because it is better to be existentially nonchalant than creepily enthusiastic.

I love kids for their violence. I treasure their willingness to undertake it without cause. I like to be proven in my hunch that simple and innocent things are not docile but iconoclastic; it lets me feel the sweetness of a bias confirmed. My congratulations to Zurbaran for Agnus Dei, it is truly a perfect painting, but I don’t think that it perfectly encapsulates the condition of innocence. Wise and morose things sit and decay; the fresh and most ignorant like to destroy. The hyperactivity and ideological apathy of children is blown out of the fucking water by Yersinia Pestis. Sorry to get graphic, but you will find no iota of malice or evil in those guys as they ride zombie white blood cells into your lymph nodes and eat you from within. Earth, the forest, the most mundane patch of lawn grass (I don’t mean to get derivatively Herzogian), are full of such wanton and constant destruction, the endless war cry of an ecosystem in which heterotrophs exist.

Don’t look at the plants for cover, I see you looking at them, you warm-hearted botanist-environmentalist. The greatest of genocides was committed by the angiosperms; the cycads and ginkgoes mourn to this day. You will find cooperation in the jungle and you will also find murder. These things are not contradictory but intertwined, intimately, evoking to me the embrace of two lovers.

I do not like when smart things commit violence, because they know what they’re doing. A being that understands the stakes and stupidity of destruction ought, in very simple terms, never to undertake it. I read about any given “great man” in history and cringe. This is not, however, a simple recognition of the man’s destructive role in our past; I recoil more specifically from the  contrast between his needless mass murder and his ostensible greatness. I watch those assholes throw soup at Van Gogh and feel contempt only to the extent that I see them as adults. They are not quite children and they are not allowed to do this; if a six year old did the same it would be an absurd act of the universe and very funny. Let Van Gogh’s most classic works get soaked in cream and tomato, please and thank you, just let an innocent thing throw the soup.

I expect so much more of a knowing thing, perhaps because I can empathize with it. I increase my sympathy logarithmically for the unthinking, because I feel no empathy for it. How lovely is it when the stranger, the millipede walking across a Costa Rica Airbnb floor, causes North Atlantic tourists screech and pull out their hair. These things are closer to God than perfect quiet lambs.

Praise the arbitrary violent. The strange and thoughtless roils in the air, the green lights of the tornado, and we feel the frisson of the divine.

A stubborn pacifist, I ponder why I’m so liable to disdain the soldiers and politicians and x-supremacists among us. Is it that I look down on them for destroying, or begrudge their ability to destroy? Does my soul, in craving the simplicity of a childlike mind state, crave also its preponderous destructiveness? Why, in watching Doydek destroy my art work, do I feel a little jealous? Why, I dare any pacifist to argue with me, does combat look so fun?

The universe is moving towards self-destruction, the cosmologists say. To destroy, then, is to join in the pantheistic will. The creative artist and the cooperative pacifist serve none other than Yaldabaoth-demiurge, laying together the bricks of samsara, and whining the whole fucking time. I have never, ever bought that art demands itself of its maker— writer’s block is much closer to the human condition, I think. The slave is whipped to build the palace but would have to be violently prevented from tearing it down. I’m getting tautological but I feel compelled to reiterate: to be natural is to destroy, destruction is nature.

Yet here we are, tending, caring, wanting things to exist without scar or trouble, in clean and comfortable spaces, where one can sit and breathe easily. We make even death easy for each other. When it’s obvious that we’re not long for this world, we get an antipsychotic, an anti-anxiety med, a thing to make us drool and vomit less, and a powerful opiate. The physicians take from us the pain, the stress, and the ability to be gross. They give us nutrients and hydration, so that our fundamental Cambrian mechanisms need not function. What we remain, essentially, are lungs, breathing slower and slower, with less regularity, until we stop breathing at all. It is wonderful, I keep reminding myself. I love knowing that the possibility of this quiet death exists.

It is good for the knowing to care, and for the unknowing to wreck. It is good for artists to make serious work, and for children to carelessly doodle. It is good for us to have empathy, and hands to make and softly caress. It is good that children have enough fingers, angled and attached in just the right way, to throw rocks at windows. It is good that trees give us fruit. It is good that evolution made mosquitoes so perfectly and efficiently awful. It is good to wish safety and health to all people, to oppose violence by both principle and wisdom, and just as good to watch a nihilist get sucker punched in the face. It is good that we suffer, and great that we enjoy. It is good to love, full stop. I believe in the goodness of all, in its totality, in its arbitrariness.

Once upon a time there was a scorpion trying to cross a river. It asked a frog to transport it across, saying “I will not sting you, or we will both sink into the depths. You will die of my venom, and I will drown in the water.” The frog was convinced by the argument, so it gave the scorpion a ride. The story ends in tragedy, of course: in the middle of the river, the scorpion stings the frog. The frog then asks, “why on Earth did you do that? Now we will both die.” The scorpion replies, “I could not help myself. It is my nature." Lots of people know the story; especially Russians, and people who were still on Tumblr during COVID.

It’s easy to interpret the story as a warning, you know, we like to take the perspective of the frog. We see the scorpion as our exes and our least favorite family members and essentially any incompetent service worker. I get stuck on the fact that the story is told from the scorpion’s perspective, however. The storyteller, whoever it originally was, intended the audience to think of the scorpion as the more human character. We sting others all the time; what should we tell the frog?

Camus imagined Sisyphus happy; I will reciprocate by imagining the scorpion good. I imagine a pale and frightened scorpion, in awe of its own mistake, and very much afraid of death. Not nonchalant at all, it looks into itself and finds the natural will to sting. When the frog asks, it answers: “I’m sorry. I’m fully aware that this hurts both of us. I don’t see my nature as ideal, but I do accept that it is my nature. You have to trust me that I tried my best not to sting you. Having done so, I am truly and genuinely sorry. I maintain the ability to love myself. I love you for trusting me enough to help. We are both good. See you soon in the abyss.”