Rootkit 8

Rootkit 8 states that 'In the good world we never judge the people we love.' It is FALSE. It is the eighth statement of the Rootkit Test.

Explanation of answer to Rootkit 8

Quoted from Puzzle One.

This is the kind of thinking the hanyos live on. Most of us here in the Nest believed this particular lie at some point in our lives. We tried heroically to prevent ourselves from judging our loved ones, but not only did we fail, we were only able to escape our suffering once we had judged them. The idea that love and judgement are opposites is a false belief that is embedded in us very early. My mother was always scared of the hanyos and sometimes angry at them, yet she did their bidding, because she had a little hanyo inside her, telling her in words dripping with contempt what to do, and the only times she ever hurt me was when I protested and questioned the voice of that little hanyo. I was always answered with a slap and the words, ‘I’m doing this for your own good.’ This made me angry, because I knew she really did believe the violence and screaming would ‘do me good’. She wanted to make me used to it so that I would be pre-enslaved when I met hanyos and hanyobait and I would do as they said without a struggle. She was afraid that if I struggled, the hanyos would kill me. 

The truth, which she could never have told me, was that she believed the hanyos had absolute power over her world, and that rather than allow me to follow my own will in even something as minor as combing my hair, she felt she had to break me before they did so they wouldn’t be tempted to do it. But temptation is a meaningless word to hanyos because they never resist it. If you stick a ‘please don’t kick me’ label on your back, what do you think they do? They kick you, right? And laugh, because you showed them where your weakness was, and they got to punish you for telling them what to do. Even as a child I could see the flaw in my mother’s reasoning, and the only result of her training was that when I did meet hanyos, I could not set aside my anger at what they’d done and were doing. I fought them when I should have been trying all along to escape them. 

After I was caught, and I saw what an idiot I’d been, I made my next mistake. I tried to change them. I told them about Antisense, I told them what was wrong with their world, and when all that failed I went up into unisense and showed them visions. They did not survive the process. It broke them because they had invested in hanyo sense so early in their lives that if they renounced it, they would just be lumps of unformed flesh. They had desired vengeance for their pain when they were too young to know how the world worked, and they did not question what they had been taught about who was to blame. My visions turned them mad and destroyed them. 

The word ‘hanyo’ means half-demon, but by the time the hanyos are old enough to be out in the world, they are composed of two parts: demon and husk. The human part of them has starved and withered into a shell or mask: it plays no part in their thoughts or long-term planning. It is the bait in front of the trap, the part of them that allows them to get close to you and mess with your head. It talks a human language, but it understands no human logic.

Hanyos are made into hanyos long before they even understand what words are. Because of their disease, they grow up shielded from the harshness of the real world, which is the only thing that can destroy false beliefs. As the baby hanyos grow and learn the ways of hanyo town, the other hanyos and people around them take part in the conspiracy to keep them just the way they are, the win-collectors of a bent system. Galata, one of our deep indigo karmics, calls this the ‘conspiracy of care’ which gives hanyos their unshakeable faith in the ‘fact’ that their world was created for their benefit, and so were all people. In hanyo town, that is the truth. Young hanyos are born into it, and older ones figure out the conspiracy of care and take control of it. 

All hanyos hold these truths to be self evident: (1) everything belongs to them, including love (2) they have to win at any cost, even in love, and (3) they feel no pain: pain is for losers, so if their loved one hurts them they must win by hurting them back. These are their axioms, their Unconditionals, if you like. You can’t argue with these ideas in hanyo town, you either have to accept or reject them. My broo Semley calls them the Three Laws of Hanyotics, but I don’t use that term because I like machines.

Now see this: if hanyo-you owns everything, then hanyo-you owns every mind that can judge you. If you’re a winner, then in your head you’ve already been judged to be the best. Anyone who judges you is saying you haven’t won yet, and you have to defeat them. Being judged is painful, right? Hanyos must feel no pain, and therefore they must avoid being judged. The hanyo universe is based on the idea that, no matter what the hanyos do, people have to love them without judging them. During the Hopscotch we have to judge all our tormentors, even the ones we love, so that we can free ourselves from their control. And when we are cured and have joined the good world of the Survivors, we judge each other to praise. 

In the survivarium every Survivor, whether weak or strong, small or big, happy or sad, gets to judge within their willspace and pleasuredome. Through karma, anyone can praise and reward a good action, and anyone can protest a wrongdoing and have their protest acted upon. But all voices are not equal: the more experienced you are in creating a particular kind of happiness (as is proved by your karma in that karma colour), the more we value your judgement about that happiness (or karma). The truth is, if we love our friends we must judge them, because the good ones want us to. They want to be admired for their good. Judgement is the source of nurture and protection, because you can’t do a good job of either if you haven’t got it. 

So if someone who has done wrong says to you, ‘If you loved me you would forgive me,’ be on your guard against the hanyo sense coming at you from them, because you will have to choose your companions with care on your journey to the survivarium. Also beware of people who say, ‘Trust me.’ In the Nest, we have taught each other to say, ‘I will never betray you.’ If everyone says this, believes it and acts on it, there is no need for trust. Trust is only needed when one party reserves the right to place the other in a weak spot. 

If you want truly to live in a world where love rules, do not say, ‘Trust me,’ to your friends, say, ‘I will never betray you.’ And have them say it back to you, and mean it. That is why we call the whole survivarium the ‘Circle of Trust’, because trust cannot exist if even one person betrays it. We’ve explained the things that must not be betrayed in the Antisense Code, which you will find at the end of these answers.