Arsonist's Lullaby

He's referencing Plato again.

First some background, so I can talk about it more easily:

Socrates was kind of a problem. Prior to his lifetime, Greek life was relatively straightforward. Gods told you what was right and wrong in an unabashedly arbitrary manner. In obeying one, you were almost certain to piss off another, and it would probably bite you at some point. But that was how things worked: You picked your allegiance and listened to one of many conflicting branches of morality that were determined by various gods in the sky (or people who spoke for them). That was virtue.

Kinda like with modern religions, or any system presented to govern human behavior, like laws.

Socrates came in and started asking questions, encouraging people to think about their points of view and form their own moral conscience, divorced from the arbitrariness of the prior system. He corrupted the youth by encouraging them to think and make up their own minds about the nature of right and wrong, rather than blindly following any of the accepted, previously extant paths.

So they killed him, quite logically, for blasphemy.

Plato wrote about Socrates' defense against these charges in The Apology. Within it, you can find him speaking of his daemon:

"I have a divine or spiritual sign which Meletus has ridiculed in his deposition. This began when I was a child. It is a voice, and whenever it speaks it turns me away from something I am about to do, but it never encourages me to do anything." (31d)

And later:

"At all previous times my familiar prophetic power, my spiritual manifestation, frequently opposed me, even in small matters, when I was about to do something wrong" (40a)

And again:

"it is impossible that my familiar sign did not oppose me if I was not about to do what was right." (40c)

Calling it a conscience is, in my opinion, modernizing the concept too much, but it is essentially an internal, inborn voice that allows someone to perform behaviors that are just, right, and beneficial, by dissuading destructive or even incidentally harmful actions.

In light of all of that, I think this song is being written from a literal arsonist's perspective.

The first verse very clearly references a Socratic daemon. A voice that sang of good things and works, and screamed at bad ones, but still allowed the child to choose to do whatever he liked. It was just a warning. Unlike for Socrates, that voice died for the speaker. Without the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, he could not genuinely choose to perform either right or wrong actions. (It's demonstrably absurd to imagine that a man can choose to Do Good when he has no way of seeing what Good is.) He was, instead, compelled by whatever moved him most.

The second verse introduces what moved him most: Fire. This could've been anything, but I find the choice especially interesting given that fire is the fundamental foundation of society (just like Socrates is the foundation of Western philosophy and even, to a large degree, religion). Human beings have always gathered around it, watched it burn, exchanged stories next to it. And that's not even mentioning the practical benefits of facilitating warmth, light, and cooked food. It's actually a sensible choice of worship, a decent barometer for right and wrong, in spite of its ability to destroy.

The third verse is interesting, and harder in a lot of ways. Gasoline, obviously, accelerates a fire, and an arsonist would use it to light other things on fire. In this case, he mistakenly thinks the gasoline is on him. This could be implying two different things: First, that he fears he's going to light himself on fire, destroy himself. Second, that he mistakenly think others would be able to smell the gasoline and discover he's a criminal. Maybe both are intended. In either case, "something would always rule" the arsonist -- even if he destroys himself, he cannot stop. Even if others detect his illegal and destructive acts, he cannot stop. And at least as a sixteen-year-old, he hasn't actually gotten gasoline on him, so he does not yet have to worry about those consequences.

In the fourth verse he finds something that he thinks will transfix him more than fire, and get him to stop lighting them, but the shift from fire to romance was not accomplished successfully. He couldn't feel peace without burning things down, so he burnt the romance away as well.

The chorus can be read however one likes, really. The arsonist has accepted his fire, both its beauty and its destruction. He knows it's all that he has, because nothing else to guide him has felt true since he lost his daemon. Now he only has a demon, a criminal compulsion. And because he can't and won't leave it, he seeks only to minimize the destruction it causes.

Relating a criminal, an arsonist, to Socrates, also a criminal, and poking at what it means to know goodness and be good is absolutely brilliant. This song really pointedly questions whether law and religion have any value, or whether we should instead be motivated by what genuinely moves us. It asks whether a man should be blamed for doing things generally considered evil, partially by appealing to the frequency with which institutionalized thought makes errors in its own determinations of what it means to be good or evil.

And then there's the title: Arsonist's Lullaby. Why is it a lullaby? Because it's how the arsonist gets himself to sleep at night. It's the perspective that excuses behavior that destroys not only the world around him, but himself. The lyric justifies destructive behavior, the title calls out the lies.

How is this guy on the radio?