"so you are tired — of even my kiss"

of the words that let you know you are not alone, but that that might not be a good thing, let's wash our hands of:

you will be neither forgiven, nor thanked.

This is a line from The Election of 1894, a now-retired event in the serial fiction browser game Fallen London. The Manager of the Royal Bethlehem, the former lover of the King of A Hundred Hearts, says these words in a tender moment with our revolutionary debatante, the Jovial Contrarian. They are both convivial and disarming when they think themselves observed. But once, you spot them in a dark corner, arguing, the treads of the Contrarian's chair creaking on the wooden floor. "...between this & the Bazaar, there is no third way." the Manager says. "You will be neither forgiven nor thanked."

No one remembers this line, no has cared about this line in the history of these characters or the history of (real!) fake fantasy elections, except for the no one who writes these very words, who has carried those very words for the past seven years like a seed crystal in the heart.

The inspiring, ethicist reading of this line is a kind of simple, funneling truism: "When doing the right thing, you will be neither forgiven, nor thanked. Do the right thing anyways." You can extend it further, even: "One way you will know that you are doing the right thing is if you are neither forgiven, nor thanked." But don't stop there: "If you are being forgiven, or thanked, you are not doing good enough." We don't build our moral fables off of this principle; this isn't how we teach good behavior in a society. What precedents would there even be for this approach?

Ah, well: there's Borges' Judas in Three Versions of Judas, perhaps the least-forgiven, least-thanked man of popular history. Perhaps he witnessed this idea, this glimpse of the necessary action beyond the pale, and knew that eclipsing his own legacy was the only guarantor of goodness. The ascetic who gives up not only worldly pleasure but their own name, who gives up the reward that would await any other kind of worldly penance, who in this pursuit of purity forsakes not wine but history and heaven...

If you're having trouble following, I'll express a dangerous idea in other terms: "If you are still being thanked for the good thing you are doing, you are definitionally making compromises to defend your own position, or to indulge your own vanity. If you are still being forgiven, you are insufficiently breaking the villainy of the status quo out of cowardice." A sufficiently morally-minded person will see this, this compromise, indulgence, and cowardice, as a sin, and a sin at such great scale as to invite moral damnation by avoiding a social one. Which is insane! Don't live like this, don't work from these first principles; embrace forgiveness and thankfulness, and find something else (maybe that very thankfulness!) to route your OCD into. Abnegation of the self will never, ever, save you.

But discounting this extension, the principle is heartening. Sometimes, in fiction, characters are tasked with the thing we the living are not: impossible stakes, incredible opportunity; and when the bell tolls for them they will not be forgiven for doing the "right" thing, nor doing their best. That this doesn't stop them, that this doesn't prevent them from proceeding is a worthwhile note to witness vicariously, but leave it on the page, or on the stage! In the real world, there is no such thing as saving the world; but only we live in that world, and must do the best with what we can.