The Third Pillar: Do NOT cast away your humanity.

I’ve written about this before, so this will be treading old ground for those of you who have read my works.  This is a refinement of that basic idea. 

If there is one thing that is the cause of the bulk of our problems as a species and as a society it is the fact that we have a beast inside each of us.  I’m certain that without the quintessential “asshole room-mate” tromping around in our skulls, we could live in relative peace with each other and with the humans too.

It is the beast that prods and pokes us. It never leaves us alone. It’s constantly there to ask you, “Are you going to take that from him?”  It makes first impressions among our kind a ticklish business. It makes us passionate and excitable. It makes us get our noses out of joint over things that probably wouldn’t have bothered us when we were alive.  It makes kindred gatherings a bit like walking around in a minefield with clown shoes on. Normally come 10 o'clock, if kindred are raising their voices,  I just tap my watch and say, "Hmm. Time to bounce."  Am I wrong?  Don't think i'd care to find out really.

But this isn't even the main reason that Kindred gatherings ought to make you nervous and have your antennae up. We are a large extended family of liars, thieves and murderers. That's bad enough. But along the course of your Requiem, you may do things. Awful things, terrible things, Things you cannot justify to yourself or forgive yourself for. And many people crack under those

sorts of stresses. And each time you do those sorts of things, you find yourself giving in to those urges more and more.

Insanity is a low-grade fever that runs through the body politic of kindred society. In any given group of more than ten kindred there is likely to be at least one person who is coocoo for coco-puffs. 

I’ve been to a gathering of at least 200 Kindred. DO the Math.

And to make it even worse, the tendency is for the elders, the most powerful of our kind to step off the curb, usually in some dramatic sturm-und-drang fashion.

And let me assure you my friends, for every single kindred who is flatly, obviously, full goose bozo, gone up over the high side, CRAZY with a capital "CRA", there are at least six kindred of your immediate acquaintance who have gone mad in some quiet way that you may not notice until it's far too late. He may be lucid for long periods of time. May even be a strong political ally of yours. And you may not even know that he's wearing underwear made from the skin of Argentinean babies.

I feel very sad for you if you don't care about that sort of thing.

Some recover. Most don't. Most get sicker and sicker with each passing night, until sooner or later joining the Brood seems pretty fucking tame compared to your night-to-night itinerary of calumny. Sadly there is a great tendency to turn a blind eye to these activities. Some people in other covenants indulge in practices that erode their basic humanity. Even the Ordo Dracul has a particular blind spot about this, eschewing traditional human morality in the name of scientific inquiry. Not all go down this road, but enough do, that it frankly scares the shit out of me.

This will come off as serious blasphemy to some, and naiveté to others, but it is my considered opinion that to reject human morality is to become alien. To reject human emotion, as the basis of one's emotional apparatus is to invite the hunger to rule your heart...Or what's left of it. And that way lies madness.

And you know the ones always excusing the loss of humanity or segregating ourselves off from the mortal world, always say that we ought to do these things in order to be better predators.  Well by that fucking logic, I should chop off my legs and jam some wheels into the stumps so I can be a better bobsled racer. Seriously?

We all make mistakes. This much is assured. Hell, a number of us wouldn't be like this, if it weren't for the mistakes we made, or the mistakes made by our sires. We are going to do things in the midst of frenzy. We are going to do really unpleasant things in the name of political expediency or some idealistic intent. We might even trade away pieces of our basic humanity in exchange for mystic power or occult understanding.

And I, personally, am going on record as saying, "THIS IS A BAD PLAN".

Let me put it to you like this: Your sanity and its maintenance is one of your most primary responsibilities. It is your responsibility to yourself, and to your covenant to retain your sanity. And it's my opinion that you cannot abdicate your responsibility on pain of death or torpor.

And this, from a man who has explored a goodly chunk of his own brainpan with a saucy mélange of chemical entertainments.

Guess what, I live alone for a reason. I try to stay sober for kindred gatherings. And even if I do some crazy thing, odds are good that I'll be sober tomorrow night, crazy people will still be crazy.

Look, the fact is that if you don't keep your humanity and sanity together you are essentially asking, nay demanding, that other members of your covenant deal with the messes you make. Some covenants are by their nature more forgiving of this sort of thing than others, but all of them will have a breaking point. No one wants to deal with a vampire who flips out over nothing or who curls up into a fetal ball and starts mewling when things get

tough. NO ONE. Nobody else wants to carry your fucking baggage.

Truthfully, I don't see how kindred politics function in face of this unpleasant tendency to madness. The fact that we still often run under political systems that Caligula would feel right at home in, might have something to do with it. But that's a screed for another time.

Check yourself. Get someone you trust to check you too. Keep an eye on your friends and speak the fuck up if you

feel you need to. Avoid, or if necessary, put down any kindred who have left their humanity and their sanity behind. And if you have to put them down, do so without hatred. Maybe after they've had a long rest they'll be more amenable to treatment.

Look. The world is a harsh place already. You shouldn’t be harsher than it.  And you shouldn’t strive to be harsher than you have to be.  

You should cry.

You should feel like a complete fucking heel at times.

You should find things to laugh at and occasions to smile and not mean any of that in a nasty predative way.

You should try to love, even if you’re not sure you remember how.

You should hurt.

There’s a good reason why you should.

Because if you cast it all away.

If you forget who you are or where you came from.

If you simply can’t handle the shocks and hurts of this existence and lock it all away so you can simply survive...

Then it were better for you to walk into the sunrise. Because you’re no different from those goons in the Brood. It doesn’t matter whose colors you’re wearing.

I hear they’re always hiring.

I think that it’s the great failing of Kindred society that they always can.