The World of Charles Cosimano

 

There is a word for the philosophy of this man—Destructionism.  Charles Cosimano has built a philosophy of life around the fundamental premise that there is no discernable truth.  In other words, while Truth, in the metaphysical sense may, and in fact, probably exist, it is not accessible to humans, nor does it in any way impact human life.  The world of Charles Cosimano is a world without God, without Justice, without morality.  It is a world of desire, pleasure, pain, and power, constrained only by raw physical, material reality.  In such a world it makes no sense to appeal to right and wrong because they simply do not exist outside of the mind of the individual and only impact society as the power of individuals.

 

An excellent example of this comes from one of his favorite stories, one he has repeated so often that it has entered the canon of his followers:

 

“When I was 17, in my last year of prison-er-high school, I handed in a paper in my American History class in which I made the perfectly rational statement that might always makes right.  My poor teacher, who never could quite figure me out, handed me back the paper with the usual A and on it he wrote, ‘Hitler had might, was he right?’  Well, after class I went up to him and simply said, ‘Hitler lost.’”

 

To Charles Cosimano, might does not merely make right, might defines right.  In other words, no matter how well-reasoned your opinion, unless it has an army to back it, it is just one opinion of many and can be ignored with impunity.  He will go his merry way and leave you to “sputter and stamp your little feetsies.”

 

Now, this is not unusual among contemporary thinkers.  What makes Charles Cosimano different is that he is intelligent enough to see where this is going and he positively embraces it.

 

“True joy is only found in the sufferings of others.”

 

No, this is not a line out of the Marquis de Sade.  It is pure Uncle Chuckie.  So is, “I haven’t laughed so hard since the fire in the nursing home!”

 

Cosimano is a man who revels in chaos, disaster and madness.  And he believes that if everyone else did the world would not necessarily be a better place, because he frankly does not care if it is better or worse, but it would certainly be more fun.  At least fun from his perspective and in his way of thinking, that is the only perspective that matters.  As he once responded to a question about the Golden Rule, “Are you crazy?  I’m a sadist, not a masochist!  The last thing in the world I want is to have done to me is what I enjoy doing to other people.”

 

It is the ability to cause disaster with impunity that is the driving force behind his research.  He is not a psychopath in the accepted sense.  He is well able to discern potential consequences for his actions.  The psionic equipment is designed to remove those consequences by the simple process of removing the power that can bring them.  Another quotation from him, “The purpose of psionics is to render law impossible by rendering its enforcement suicidal,” should be sufficient to describe his ideas on the matter.  In fact, contempt for the very concept of law is a mainstay of his social thought.  He has defined a law as, “A scrap of paper, proposed by lunatics, passed by crooks, enforced by thugs and obeyed by wimps.”

 

In another context he has said that someday “The idea of law will be as quaint an anachronism as ‘the divine right of kings.’”

 

In such a world, nothing is true and everything truly is permitted.  That is the goal of his work.  And, slowly and surely, with infinite patience, he is achieving that goal and creating that world.