Merry's Lamb

Besmele ( 19 ) harften oluşmaktadır.

“Individuals who deviate from the normalized social order are not only bad for propaganda, but maintain the threat of inspiring other emancipations. Individuals who desire freedom beyond the limitations of political programs don’t require a package-deal of future utopia. Rather than workin’ now to play later, play and adventure accompany a present determination for wild exploration. Armed with a sense of urgency, life becomes a playground of individual flowering and negation to social constraint- a playground that allows free, open-ended social associations and interactions not coerced by a structural permanence. Individuality armed with chaos finds itself as an insurgent against the social forces that attempt to subjugate it. As individuality becomes wild, it becomes immune and ungovernable to the carefully constructed programs advertised by the politicians of identity and revolution. Those self-proclaimed revolutionaries can only conceive of revolution as merely reforming the social conditions that constitute order. But some of us prefer insurrection over revolution; an insurrection that doesn’t end with a new system but a life without measure. I want to weaponize chaos as an individualized attack on all governance and social order. I envision anarchy as a wildfire that blackens the civilized, domesticated kingdom of institutional and social domination. Getting free is more than just attacking capital and the state. At least for me, it also means creating your self every single day beyond society’s attempts to define you as a static being. My war is an individualist war against the right-wing and all its variations. I am at war with the materialized construction of patriarchal “whiteness”, its institutions, and its politically assumed supremacy that materializes the colonial domination of industrial capitalism. My war is also against the left, and all its attempts to manufacture a future world of systematized “freedom” through formal organization, the preservation of socially constructed identity and the subservience of individuality to social groupings. My liberation won’t be found in the holy book of “The Communist Manifesto”, “Forbes Magazine”, nor “The Coming Insurrection”. Freedom isn’t a pre-configured future utopia; it is a lived experience by those who have the courage to reclaim their lives as their own here and now. In the face of those revolutionary elites who attempt to lay claim to the future with their poetic social seduction and academic expertise, I remain insubordinate.”

“Spinoza defines an affect or emotion as a ‘modification of the body, whereby the active power of the body is increased or diminished, aided or constrained’ (Ethics IIID3). There are two most basic affects, joy and sadness, and joy means just this: an increase in power, a body’s ‘passage from a lesser to a greater perfection’ (Ethics IIIP11). This is a thoroughly dynamic notion: joy is not a finished state of being powerful or fulfilled, it is a movement, a becoming. As the cliché says, it’s the journey that counts not the destination. So, yes, it is possible to live joyfully even in a world of shit. Because joy is not dependent on external forces, it is not a passive state. It is the feeling of becoming active and challenging the limits imposed on me. And however dark the world around me, however severe the limits, there is always a possibility of becoming active. But in what possible sense can we live freely in this world? Maybe this seems like empty rhetoric. And, after all, freedom is a very general concept, and often used in an empty way. Basically it just means the absence of a constraint, of a force stopping you from doing something. As there are many kinds of constraints, there are many kinds of freedom: e.g., the freedom to fill your belly or wear what you want in the street without getting harassed, or the cherished capitalist freedom to grab wealth and exploit others without being held responsible for the suffering you cause. Still, I think there is a real and vital sense in the idea of “living freely” in a hostile world. Another philosopher, Epictetus, starts his ‘manual’ for living by noting: ‘There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power.’ Where ‘the things within our power are by nature free, unrestricted, unhindered; but those beyond our power are weak, dependent, restricted, alien.’”