The Vampire must be confronted. He is very frightening, but he must be confronted. He may be frightening because he is arrogant or because he is obtuse or because he transmits such a sense of pity that we fear we will hear him scream with pain like a wounded animal, and so we prefer to give him our blood. But on the contrary, he must be made to face himself, and once "rehumanized", helped to repair the evil that he has done.

We shouldn't fear the Vampire, because, although he is dehumanized and merciless, he came into this world as we did, he has cried and suffered, and before becoming a Vampire he experienced feelings and all their implications. Under the illusion that he would not suffer any more, he chose to leave the world of the living, that is the world of feelings, and enter that of the Non-Dead, a world where feelings no longer exist, or rather are buried under tons of earth and debris.

We shouldn't fear him because he has so many weak points. In fact, one might say that he is one big weakness, although he does nothing but show off his power. As we have already seen, his first weak point consists in living his own myth: he reproaches others for their scant adherence to reality, and then continually gives in to illusory flights of rhetoric about himself and his power. We must remember: a Vampire is always a myth, but a false myth, an unfounded myth. And since there is always some disgrace hidden behind a false myth, we should neither fear him, much less go along with him, but merely pursue him, catch up to him, and make him face himself in front of a mirror in which he may see his Nothingness reflected (like the Vampires of tradition, who cannot see their reflection in the mirror).

To perform this difficult and delicate operation, we must do exactly what we would never want to do, and which even he is mortally afraid of (as the Vampire of tradition is afraid of the cross): grant him respect. Not respect for his power, but respect for him. Human respect, not servile praise for the power with which he identifies.

As we have already stressed, the Vampire can't help humiliating others' sensibility, or at least breaking the most elemental rules of courtesy. Normally when this happens, we are asleep, in the sense that we aren't even able to notice the negative importance of that behavior. Or rather, trapped as we are in the Vampire's web, we endure it in silence, as though the pain with which we have been inflicted belonged to the natural order of things. Doing this means not respecting either ourselves or others. Instead, as we have stressed, the Vampire should be given respect, because he has been, and may once again become, a human being.

The moment we are besieged by one of his aggressive acts, and find ourselves at the junction where the choice lies between succumbing to him or ignoring him with superiority, we must remember that he has happened to cross our path, and that perhaps this has some meaning. Perhaps there is something we can learn from the experience of having met him, for example, that we can free ourselves from his noose. And perhaps we can do something - in fact, a lot - for him, for example, remind him that men are equal, and that whether he believes it or not, he was born neither better nor worse than others.

The symbol of the stake in the Vampire's heart, which is so dear to tradition and to literature, means just this: that to recover that individual and bring him back to the grace of God (that is, to being at peace with himself and with his fellow man), we must touch his heart by thrusting in the wedge of a truth as sacred as it is difficult to accept: that all men are equal.

Being clear about the concept of "sincerity of the heart"

If we attempt to accord respect to the Vampire by beginning a dialogue with him about his humiliating and damaging behavior, he will start to rattle off his entire repertory of commonplace vampiric clichés: he will treat us as though we were mentally ill, he will ridicule us and say that we invented it all, or else he will get offended and maintain that we have an unjust view of things and that our reactions are proof of the fact that we are touchy, surly, irritable, unfit to live among "normal people" and especially to have anything to do with people like him; he will conclude that, given our touchiness, from now on he will refrain from being sincere with us.

In particular he will take advantage of the concept of "sincerity". The Vampire, in fact, often strengthens his own myth by asserting that he is someone who "speaks frankly", a rare and precious representative of an extinct race: those who are sincere, direct, genuine, and know how to "speak their mind". Their mind, perhaps, but as for their heart, that remains to be seen. Their sincerity, in fact, almost always consists of saying unpleasant things to others or in issuing discrediting judgments.

The Vampire, in the name of "sincerity", tears the sensibility and often the reputation of others into shreds, passing off as a moral virtue that which is merely the bestial craving of abuse of power.

But we will never stop him unless we convince ourselves that true sincerity is sincerity of the heart, not of the tongue. It's a sincerity which the Vampire is unable to understand and which does not at all lie in calling the hunchback person a hunchback, or the cross-eyed person cross-eyed, or the crippled person a cripple. Or worse yet, in pretending to see faults in others which they do not have, and throwing them into their faces.

Sincerity of the heart is a very different thing, because it is based on respect for the sensibility of others. In fact, only by not furiously attacking others (in the language of the Vampire: "being sincere") can we help those in difficulty be in closer contact with their own dignity.

The Vampire, on the other hand, by furiously attacking those who are most defenseless - perhaps with the excuse of "motivating" them, but in reality to satisfy his hunger for energy - will push them inexorably toward destruction.