Conventional wisdom has long identified the authoritarian presumption of our masters with life-affirming exuberance—as though the baying of the leaders of a pack of hounds could be taken for joie de vivre. Compelled for centuries to reason in terms of power and subordination, victory and defeat, and success and failure, the function of thought has been so thoroughly captured by the function of government that the crumbling of patriarchal despotism and the disintegration of the pyramids of hierarchy have visited a powerful backlash upon it.
As a mercantile civilization ruled by power and profit approaches a stage at which even its violence is mitigated, those who claim that the status of intellectuals has sunk into the sort of insignificance from which “spectacular unreality” can barely contrive, for all its smoke and mirrors, to elicit more than a spark of curiosity, the briefest of infatuations, from its hosts of rubberneckers.
Pity the intellectuals, reduced as they are to brawling instead of discovering the life that struggles and sours beneath their endlessly patched-up armor.
But what do we care about the decadence of a thought which by abstracting the living forces denatures and dehumanizes man? What I seek, beyond the schism that fragments man, is an intelligence attuned to the unity of the body and universal life: a thought in search of the human.
All intellectualism is repressive, so it was predictable that it should join the downward trajectory of the old forms of oppression. This was true if only because the decrepitude of a hierarchical system in accordance with which the master ordains and the slave complies was bound to entail the mental and physical castration of both.
Indeed, as repression became more indolent, voluntary lethargy and servitude tended to render it superfluous. An endemic fear seemed to plunge populations into a leaden apathy permeated by hate and resentment. It was as though the nightmare of the end of the world prevented humans from awakening and recovering their lucidity and their dignity.
Yet we know full well that the end of mercantile civilization is not the end of the world but rather the dawn of a new civilization.
There have been decades in which, instead of tilting at the already tottering windmills of capitalism, it would have been better to lay the groundwork of a living society founded on solidarity and destined to replace the old system.
Nor were opportunities to do so few and far between:
(a) The fact that the ferocity of repression was languishing just as much as insurrectional violence paradoxically opened the door to life, which can overcome all opposition thanks to the flexibility of its indomitable persistence.
(b) If mankind seeks reconciliation with nature, from which it emerged but which it has betrayed, let it learn to transform the violence of the death wish into a violence that flows from the will to live.
(c) Let man strive to harness nature’s inexhaustible energy to the equally inexhaustible largesse of the life that creates and recreates itself in such profusion.
(d) The wheeler-dealers of short-term profit have flooded consumer society with a “hedonism of the last days” whose motto, “Enjoy today because tomorrow will be worse,” is doubly lucrative for them: it helps sales while tightening the shackles of resignation, passivity and fatalism. It is up to us to free authentically experienced pleasure from the gangue that imprisons, falsifies, inflates and commodifies it. The day must come when “being” emancipates itself from “having.”
The worst result of the bankers’ crimes and the cynicism of the market are less the lies and dishonesty than the occult fascination of money, as though it were the supreme value—the value with the power to buy all others. People who persist in voting for the flacks of big business have the souls of petty chiselers who dream of becoming big-time crooks with impunity. Everywhere the cult of having and predation destroys the human being.
Life is pure gratuity: it offers itself and asks nothing in return. Not only is it incompatible with the economy, which reduces it to lugubrious survival, but it is also capable of liberating us from it.
We have to start over from scratch. Too many would-be revolutionaries have believed they were delivering mortal blows to a capitalism collapsing under the weight of its own absurdity when in reality their blows were nothing but the allegorical haymakers of braggarts. The revolution of everyday life does not consist in freeing the repressed, setting fire to the symbols of oppression, or wreaking vengeance on the puppets of power—on bosses, police, or servants of the State. The old world is quite used to managing the safety valves that violence unleashed can provide for frustrations built up day after day.
For far too long dissenters have been content to start fires in a house whose roof is already in flames. How long it has taken for people to realize that they had best leave their dwelling and try to build another, where the fires of joy will warm their hearts without consuming them!
Once civil disobedience arises less from voluntarism than from the life instinct, no oppression will be powerful enough to resist the surge of freedoms that living calls forth in irresistible waves.
Enhanced by human consciousness, life is a weapon that creates instead of killing. It is the source of a lesson that in these troubled times needs to be heard: what must be contested is the totalitarian system which oppresses us and not the people who believe they are in charge of it when in fact they are no more than its pale avatars.
Too often we have complacently conflated lived experience with the symbols that claim to represent it. With frightening ease we fail to distinguish between analogy and symbol. Their meanings, however, are radically different.
Analogy signifies beings and things viewed via the interplay of their similarities. It is the science of resonances, of those correspondences whose microcosmic and macrocosmic effects have barely begun to be studied.
Symbols serve detached thought. They are analogies manipulated by the mind. They therefore display all the mind’s cruelty.
What credit can be given to someone who burns down a bank, murders a boss, or loots a store on the grounds that their act threatens the banking system, ends exploitation, or abolishes the commodity?
“To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine,” noted Sebastian Castellio. “It is to kill a man.”
So many aggressions and assassinations visited upon poor people unlucky enough to incarnate symbolic figures! So many people immolated for letting some label or other be pinned on them!
At least toll systems or machines do not suffer. No one spills blood by sabotaging the armamentarium of control and extortion. Smashing cash registers, ignoring highway charges or gumming up the bureaucratic gear wheels of State and multinational mafias are arguably ways of protecting citizens from crooked taxes and tithes meant to feed the voracious maw of financial malfeasance. One can hardly object to civil disobedience contesting every sort if diktat.
But our war cannot be limited to browsing amid the ruins of market civilization. On the contrary, it must prepare, beyond all war, to create new conditions for life. That is the only way to break the grip of the commodity once and for all.