Disentangling the Thread of Life from the Past That Has Hidden It

No matter how strewn with wreckage our inhuman past may be, it never fails to reveal glistening gems in the shape of the great works that genuinely human genius has bequeathed so as to arouse in us the wish to perfect or at least develop them. From now on everyone is at liberty to delve into the libraries and conservatories of universal culture in search of ways to enrich their daily existence and the surroundings in which it is ensconced. Every individual manages his or her destiny alone as they face a brutal point-blank ultimatum: comply with the demands of an arduous survival or examine your desires and fulfill them for the sake of your own happiness and the happiness of others.

It is from our physiological and emotional body that everything which happens to us arises; not that circumstances independent of our will cannot affect us, but just as the smell of fear can excite the predator, we call forth from within us many an occurrence that later seems to us to have been determined from without.

Chance, said Nietzsche, is yourself reaching yourself. The creativity of the human being enjoys an extraordinary privilege: the consciousness of what happens inside us, the light cast on the physiological and psychological magma, on the emotional chaos that either destroys us or builds us up, depending on whether we abandon it to bestiality or dedicate it to the endless largesse of life.

There are more and more of us who have become aware not just that the world we inhabit is also within us but also, and above all, that the individual’s resolve to prioritize life over survival has the poetic power to jam up the works of the old world and set the new in motion.

Today nobody is unaware to what extent a predatory economy has for millennia mechanized the life forces and ruled our behavior. Using the pretext of the domination of nature, man has enslaved himself to a system that has brutally impeded his human development.

The resolution no longer to be master or slave and to live free in accordance with desires emancipated from their simulacra means forever eradicating the following:

• The predatory instinct that has its roots in animal nature and is the clearest manifestation of the denaturing of man.
• The dominance of the strongest and the most cunning, as imposed by the cult of competition.
• That guilt which can only be exorcised by blaming others, and which is intrinsic to commercial exchange (since everyone is considered guilty of never sufficiently converting their life force into labor force).
• The sacrifice attendant upon struggles for survival in which the one sacrificed is ever ready to seize the knife of the one doing the sacrificing. Only by seeking their own happiness do individuals come to realize that the happiness of one is inseparable from the happiness of all.
• Tactical, strategic and statistical manipulation of the dictatorship of quantity over quality. The fact is that life offers itself without calculation and expects nothing in return. Life is pure generosity: it counts on nothing and counts nothing.
• The power over others that individuals arrogate to themselves. We do not have to give or receive orders. We do not have to tolerate threats, rebuke or fear.
• The sovereignty of money, which is indispensable to survival and hence one of the chief humiliations inflicted on human beings. So far from contributing to an intense, love-filled and joyous life, money’s cold hand does nothing but corrupt it.
• Thought separated from life, source of the abstract system known as ideology which—after the fashion of religion subordinating humans and the earth to the decisions of extraterrestrial and fantastical gods—invents a heaven of ideas, or Spirit, that dictates to a body whose consciousness is ignored and scorned.
• The vicious circles of taboo and transgression, authority and permissiveness, repression and release—contradictions which, instead of being surpassed, are held captive and exacerbated, generating conflicts for which life always pays the price.
• The doctrine of man’s inherent weakness as propagated by religions and ideologies that would lose their advantage and dominion if they were unable to mass-produce the cripples to whom they sell crutches.