Take care not to mistake the above observations for prescriptions. It is not a question of complying with moral imperatives. The drawback with any ethical injunction is that it is not always in harmony with our desires; that our pleasure sometimes overrides it; that the vitality of our passions finds it austere, even puritanical. The struggle we wage at every instant to make our daily existence happier must be the surest and most relevant basis of our demands.
Making it a duty to reject power, arrogance, pride and presumption still boils down to submission to an abstract voluntarism. Away with the tyranny of good intentions! Rebuke partakes of the despotism that the mind inflicts upon the body. No freedom can be forged in shackles.
Survival knows no rights unaccompanied by duties. Life is a right that no duty must pay for.
The body is our raw material—the materia prima in the alchemists’ sense. Everything flows from the body, beginning with the human consciousness that refines our instinctual animal nature and transcends rather than tries to throttle it.
Consciousness is humble; the mind is prideful. The one exalts the riches of the body; the other dilapidates them. Thought cut off from life is the embryo of all despotism.
Experience teaches that the life force dissipates as soon as it shows off, attitudinizes and morphs into a will to power. Vitality is an energy which undergoes continual renewal so long as it remains an inner force acting in the arcana of that alchemy whereby we subject our drives, our emotions, our desires and our thoughts to a subtle process of refinement and transmutation.
No sooner is that force imprudently externalized than the alchemical vessel—the athanor—cracks. It is owing to a fissure in being that vitality leaks out and flows into the maw of appearances and is devoured. There is no better explanation of why the will to power is vitality stricken by impotence, by an inability to live.
The utility of ethics is distinctly ephemeral. It resembles those laws which to a certain degree guarantee the freedoms of action, expression, thought and individual desire but do no more, ever so briefly, than make the stifling atmosphere in our prisons breathable. Ethics partakes of the kind of justice that governs social relations in the manner of commercial exchange, where equity consists in not doing “too much” harm.
Calls to boycott a product, a policy, or a practice smack of hypocrisy and arrogance if they fail to offer an alternative, one more compatible with the enjoyment of life. Would it make any sense to urge someone who needs the crutches of religion simply to toss them aside?
How can we advocate a boycott of consumption without simultaneously proposing a form of individual and social life that can advantageously replace it?
To reject capitalism and in doing so forgo all the benefits and advantages it has lavished on mere survival would only perpetuate the self-sacrifice that the reign of labor passes off as a virtue. The advances made in capital’s factories and laboratories belong to us—not because they were bought with the blood of countless generations but because we want a world where satisfaction is not paid for in any coin or by relinquishing anything at all. Only the attraction and the reality of a richer life can drive us forward by disarming and banishing the inhumanity of the past.