by
From Adbusters #118:
“We must die as egos and be born again in the swarm, not separated and self-hypnotized, but individual and related.”
— Henry Miller
We are trapped in this system.
We live in bondage.
Chained to the workplace, school, home, bedroom, subway tunnel and fiber optic web?—?we use these to define the self. Wherever we are, we feel nowhere; what ever we do, we feel empty.
This despair is life when potential has been amputated. The by-product of existence reduced to automated regimes of work and leisure. Our identity sighs under imposed limits, crippled under the burden of too much weight?—?too many dead ends. Amid this disfigurement we are bombarded by a culture telling us to be ourselves?—?feel free and find happiness. The happiness industry pushes anesthetics. Adjustments through therapy, thought management, advice, mediation, anti-depressants and other outside influences meant to numb the tediousness of plastic existence. All these products impact our sleep … leave us weak and susceptible to further servility.
A battalion preaches self-help armed with published works and talking head broadcast time slots … chicken soup …. We read, we write, we listen?—?we recommend them to friends. Our blog and social media presence becomes our window to the world?—?one way in?—?an endless procession of sanitized advice and anecdotal techniques for self-mutilation.
We huddle together as private, paranoid and broken beings desperate to help one another find ways to cope with the absurdity of living death. We are obsessed with ourselves and obsessed with freedom; we talk endlessly about both because we don’t possess either. The blindness of our culture begins with the words “I” and “free.” When spoken, betrayal, loss and enclosure floats over our lips with the breath. The self is a concept marked by the fencing in of life?—?“I” has become emaciated and reduced to an easily identifiable, managed and governable form. It is ruthless violence imposed upon the exuberant becoming of life. The more I am myself, the more I feel crippled and separated from the potential of my being?—?in body, intellect and affect. The self has never been free. It is the mark of servility, the form in which it is to masquerade as freedom.
It has gone too far. We cannot simply shake off our chains. We have more than them to lose, more to overcome. Our mode of being is enslaved. Capitalism does not exist outside of us. It crafts us. We have to be obsessed with it. It exists within us and oozes from us. Man has become servile to the deposit of numbers in ledger columns … our being pivots on this tide.
We must declare war on ourselves and the cultural, political and economic systems constructed as idols to the chains of our own entrapment. We must break the prison of capital. To do this we need politics free from servility.
Systems founded on the notion of emancipation?—?cornerstoned on the reclamation of a future free from idols old and new. This is the politics of potential. The politics of multiplication of possibilities for thought and action?—?a politics beyond all concepts and truths?—?beyond all prisons nourished on obsolete language. The vital overflow of limits encouraged by the essence of Nietzsche’s politics of self-overcoming?—?to struggle against servility is the struggle against ourselves.
Victory demands the death of the self. We must die in order to END THE REIGN OF CAPITAL and the servitude of the individual. We must die to rediscover life.
—?Michael Laurence is a Canadian writer, Ph.D. candidate and instructor in political theory. His work aims to rethink democracy as a vitality that exceeds and overcomes the reactive politics of the state-form.
Source
