Anti Vampire Center

The system of denial

The Vampire of tradition is allied with the devil. And the devil of tradition is denial. "I deny", is his magic formula. The philosophy of the Vampire is based more or less on these propositions: "I deny you. I deny the life that is in you, and I advise you to conform to my rules if you don't want to pay the consequences. If there is an emotional relationship between us, my blackmail will be based on the denial of affection. If I am your superior, I will deny you every fair recognition of worth. If there is an economic relationship between us, I will deprive you of every means of subsistence. If we have a confrontation, I will deny you any acknowledgement and bring everybody over to my side". For a world based on the affirmation of human nature, the Vampire substitutes one based on its denial.

The appropriation of energy in the form of human dignity

The modalities for the appropriation of energy range from the denial of a greeting, a smile, one's attention, a reply to a question, and the recognition of worth to psychological violence and the denial of freedom to think, or even to live. Let's take the most common example, the denial of a greeting.

How many times has it happened to us, when meeting a person whom we know only slightly but who surely remembers us, that we greet him and receive only a dark silence in return? The feeling that something strange is happening comes over us at once, making itself felt like an imperceptible variation in the atmosphere, a slight discomfort followed by a sense of nausea. It has already happened: the energy is already gone. The Vampire has had his "dose". How could it have happened, just like that, in a split second? Like the bite of a mosquito: one second and the blood is gone. The explanation is simple: that person, for one instant, has deprived us of our human dignity. He decided that the most elementary laws of good manners could be suspended, and he fed upon the drop of blood that seeped out from that small wound to our dignity.

Unfortunately the denial of dignity always works, because it's an objective datum, a fact. The Vampire is extremely powerful because he has understood this mechanism: all you have to do is deny men their dignity, and energetic sustenance is assured. In fact, the victim has no possibility of avoiding the "theft". In the future, obviously, he can choose not to greet that person any more, but the Vampire will be expecting it: he will accept any future greeting as though it were an unexpected gift (though naturally he will not respond to it), but he will certainly not suffer if it is not granted. It's a vile trap, which must work, which must not leave any way out to someone who has been courteous to him. For this to happen, even one time will suffice.

In this specific instance, the victim, aside from planning future counter-denials of the greeting, has very few possibilities of obtaining "reparation" for the damage he has suffered. He can either meekly accept what has happened, or he can react with superiority and think to himself: "Who cares about his greeting!". In the latter case, he will enter into the logic of the Vampire, according to which men are not equal: either one of the two feels superior to the other and the other accepts it, or both of them feel superior and look down on one another. This is the power of the Vampire.

Naturally, we have used a very specific example in which there has not been a true vampiric persecution, and in which the victim is the object of an almost innocuous act. Exactly like the bite of a mosquito. But from this point on, a long, painful case history of aggressive actions may develop, like those we live with on a daily basis.

By the very fact that it drives our fellow man toward conditions of imposed humiliation or forced superiority, the denial of dignity (a theme that is present in all of Mario Corte's stories and to which we will return often) is a small crime against humanity and against the sole, incontrovertible truth, religious and secular, that exists on earth: namely, that all men are equal.