There’s a thing about men. There’s quality of foolishness and shortsightedness that is the ultimate of tragic characteristics. Men don’t care about so much as they care about injustice. The thief reconciles injustice through taking things for compensation, the sheriff reconciles injustice by attempting to enforce a moment of he perceives to be justice, and the man in-between reconciles injustice by ending himself. The last man may not put a bullet in his own brain or starve himself, but he will leave reality. He will stop feeling and thinking. The third man does not steal or enforce, but he does disengage. The first two are heroic because they will trade everything for a bullet to kill the other, but the third is disregarded because he accepts a muted existence so that he can survive.

The great motivator of unselfishness is the idea of permanent death.  The man who believes in permanent death commits himself to an idea, while the man who believes in a Heaven commits himself to himself. To believe in permanent death means to avenge the death of another or to avenge the impending death of one’s own self. To believe in eternal life means to commit oneself to the acquisition of that everlasting life. If I believe that I can attain eternal life, or that it is available to all who are righteous, then I can toil in the soil without remorse. But if I believe in the ethereal-mentality of life, if I believe that there is no life after this one, then the mistreatment of life is a crime that cannot be fully punished. And so the thief and the sheriff trade everything for a bullet to kill the other because they believe that this life is everything.  

The thief wishes to kill all authority because he has suffered and the authority claims responsibility. The sheriff wishes to kill all who object to authority because they are responsible for the loss of all that a man is entitled to. In the end, the thief and the sheriff kill one another and the man who has chosen to escape reality, the man who breathes through his mouth, is the survivor. The irony is that each of the three gets what he desires. The thief desires death, which is alright because Life has given cards of suffering, the sheriff desires death, which is alright because Life has given him cards of suffering, and the Apathetic Objector does not desire life because he has already gained it by not entering into the duel between the thief and the sheriff.  He lives because he does not care about living.

What muddles things is that the thief believes that he is righteous as the sheriff does. In fact, both believe themselves to be the sheriff. The thief believes that he is righting the wrongs committed by the unjust and that what is required of him is counter-cultural. The sheriff believes that he is righting the wrongs because what is required of him is to fulfill the desire of culture. The thief on the cross is not only joining the King of Righteousness because he asked to do so, but because he sacrificed his life for the acquisition of justice.