MY MANIFESTO:

Draw a tight circle around your life and let everything outside that circle fade to black. Direct physical action is what matters. What else is there to work with? Words? Words are useless—worse than useless, in fact, because they feed the speaker’s own vanity. And if you want to talk about money as a way of making the world better, the only problem with money is that the bad guys will always have more of it.

How did silence get such a bad rap? Everybody these days thinks the world of their own voice, thinks that by raising that voice, they’re doing something. Wrong. Nobody except you cares what you have to say. Silence does not equal complicity; silence equals humility and also practicality. Silence turns your attention away from yourself. Am I talking about the importance of listening? Yeah, sure, a little I suppose, but it’s more inward looking, more personal than that. Just stop talking, stop posting, stop tweeting. Shut up. A lot opens up to you, to your mind and your senses, once you do that.

Because in the end you are not a voice. You are not a name, not an identity; all that is vanity. In the end you are a body. That is the most, maybe the only, useful thing at your disposal. You must not flatter or deceive yourself about that.

And it’s harder for some than for others. It doesn’t matter who I am, but here are a few demographic facts just so you know roughly where I’m coming from: I am a white man, born in the twentieth century. I am American. I am straight and was not raised in conditions of poverty. The places I lived, the schools I went to, the jobs I applied for: I never had to think about how any of those things came to be there. They were just there. As was I. No one ever had to bother to encourage me to think of myself as an individual, to think of my efforts and successes as individual efforts and successes, because I thought of them that way automatically.

But I am not an individual. My voice is a fiction and a distraction. It took me many years to realize this. It took me many years to stop cherishing myself. To some, that understanding is second nature, but for people like me, it’s been difficult to acquire, because the world told me otherwise for so long.

I’m not blaming other people. I made a lot of mistakes. Mostly what I’ve made are mistakes. But that’s why you have to do something. There’s no second life where you get to apply all that you learned about yourself in the first one. You can’t just keep doing the same things over and over, petering out that way, and flattering yourself that it matters a damn how you feel about it all.

The truth is I got tired of my history. The personal, the political, it’s all one history for a guy like me: the history of hurting people without meaning to and then saying sorry. All the long-ago historical grotesquerie for which people wanted to hold me responsible: I don’t mean that that presumption was unfair. I just wanted out from under it, I wanted to start over. A lot of nice liberal white men might say something similar, but so what? The point is to make it happen. Your lineage, your name, these things don’t have to define you, not if you don’t let them. You don’t have to own what you inherit. You can begin again. You can rebrand. You can go to sea, you can light out for the territories. It’s the classic American story.

My old spot in the world, by the way, was a fairly cushy one—unconsciously advantaged, privilege-derived—and now that spot is open. You’re welcome.

Autumn was wrong: I am a sleeper. Was.

Also, just get off the fucking internet. Forget the idea that anything happens there. It’s a playground, it’s an opiate. The whole reason it exists is to ensure that nothing ever changes.

You have no purpose, no meaning. You are not “here for a reason.” You do have, once you open yourself up to it, an opportunity.

You must make your life smaller, because that makes your own proportional value greater. Scale yourself up. One to one. Or, in my own best-case scenario now, one to five.

Maybe a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but only a piece of a big one.

Forget the systemic. Forget the intersectional. Just do what you can do to reduce the amount of suffering that you can see right in front of you. Not everybody’s got the stomach for it, of course. We’ll see if I have the stomach for it.

Nobody sees me anymore, because nobody wants to see me. I’m a down-on-his-luck white man. They want me to exit the world—both those who know me best and those who just walk past me sitting on the sidewalk, propped up against the federal building, across from the courthouse. Well, I want to exit the world, too, but it’ll all feel a little less vain if I can take some people with me when I go.

My privilege is all gone, but what survives, it turns out, is the feeling of privilege—of what is due me, of how I demand to be treated—and that feeling may be reprehensible and wrong, but it can still be empowering and even useful.

Why the judge, some will ask? It makes plenty of sense when you think about it: because of the tank. Because of whatever he did when he was invisible inside that tank instead of posing on it for his portrait. Because of the suffering he has caused so many of the people who have been brought before him. Because he presumes to consider himself a judge of men at all and to ask us to consider him one. And also because I don’t want to get caught. So basically, two reasons: one, because there’s no connection; two, because it’s all connected.

I went to the woods to live deliberately—

That’s him.

The world is a ruined place, and that is our doing. Some of us much more than others. Still, it’s a fantasy that you are somehow going to make this world better by adding something to it, bringing something to it. The only way to improve this world is to subtract from it. Only subtract.

In my imagination, he was walking to his car in some underground garage, me a few silent steps behind him, and we were the only two people in the picture. But there’s no underground garage, just a VIP lot that’s full of people, some of whom wave to him, some of whom call to him, as I start down the next rank of cars. Still, it’s not impossible that I will get away with it. People are famously startled when something like this happens; their memory is famously clouded. Who could recall me? I might well walk away, my time still unexhausted.

If I don’t, though, that’s okay. Still a net gain for the unjudged of this world.

He turns, and in his eyes there is a flicker of acknowledgment that something may be wrong, but he still gives me a big, reflexive smile, that old campaigner. From up close he looks nothing like me at all.