Musonius Rufus, Lectures 12.4

"That's all very well," you say, "but unlike the adulterer who wrongs the husband of the woman he corrupts, the man who has relations with a courtesan or a woman who has no husband wrongs no one for he does not destroy anyone's hope of children."

I continue to maintain that everyone who sins and does wrong, even if it affects none of the people about him, yet immediately reveals himself as a worse and a less honorable person; for the wrong-doer by the very fact of doing wrong is worse and less honorable.

A common precept I hear is that I should do whatever I want, as long as I don’t hurt anyone. Indeed, it would hardly be a vice if it didn’t do any damage, and so it would seem that many of the things I question are really just victimless crimes, hardly crimes at all, since there are no victims.

If a woman isn’t married, and no husband will be cuckolded, where’s the harm? If a man wants to do all of these things with me, where could there possibly be any offense?

At first, this sounds great to me, since it clears me from an accountability for much that I might desire. Then I realize that it only looks good on paper, since I have never in my whole life stumbled across any action that has no effect upon others. There are no real divisions or compartments in human relations, especially not where matters of sex are concerned.

The human heart is not a stone, and the human mind does not exist in a vacuum. All things are closely connected, for better or for worse.

Sexuality is, by its very nature, profoundly intimate, and so it will also cause both the deepest joy and the deepest pain. I have seen struggles about money tear people apart, and I have seen conflicts about status draw blood, but I have observed the greatest agony, both in myself and in others, from a broken heart.

Touch someone in the most personal way possible, both in body and in soul, and the consequences will be earth-shattering.

“It was just sex, what’s the big deal?” If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.

But let me imagine, only in theory, that my choice of sexual partners and practices affected no one else at all. Let me imagine, along similar lines, that I stole a million dollars from a bank, but they didn’t even notice it, and they went on being just as profitable as they had always been. Would that be acceptable?

Who has been hurt? That one person I have most failed to offer the respect he deserves, that one person for whom I am most responsible. I have wronged myself. In treating other human beings as objects, things to be enjoyed and then cast aside, I have done damage to them on the outside, while I have also crippled myself on the inside.

I am always my own worst victim.

The “Stoic Turn” asks me to see my own character as my highest good, as my most important goal, and I destroy myself whenever I abuse another for my own gratification, even if the other does not necessarily feel all that abused.

Years after the fact, I will still have nightmares about someone I should never have been foolish enough to become so closely intimate with, and I will still wake up either screaming or crying. If being more of a man means no longer caring, I don’t want to be that sort of a man.

At another shameful time, I once passionately kissed a young lady, and I mean the term with the proper respect for her, after one of those drunken college parties I should never have been at in the first place.

She was a kind and sensitive soul, and she asked me when she would see me again. My so-called friends brutally mocked me for showing an interest in her, so when I did see her again, I pretended that nothing had happened.

I can still see that vivid picture of the hatred and disappointment in her eyes, not because I was some great catch, but because I had been such a terrible ass. I wrote her a letter of apology much later, when I realized what I had done, but that doesn’t really make it any better, does it?

As soon as I see another life as a disposable vehicle, I have already abandoned my own humanity. That terrible ass stabs himself in his own heart.

Sorry, Aleister Crowley, you’re not going to suck me in with “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law". Maybe it works for the neo-pagans who worship sex, money, and power as their gods, but I know I am made for something better. I learned that the hard way.

Written in 12/1999