non serviam

"Become as insensitive (and hence as easy to handle) as a brick! That is what the social order benevolently asks everyone to do.”

If Zhaungzi was writing today I think it's very plausible that a character in one of his dialogues would be Taco Bell Cashier and he would humble either Confucius or some great emperor

"Proudhon adds that the people are also victims of the mystification in which they spontaneously become accomplices. Stripped of all assets, they enjoy in their imagination what they are excluded from: they revere their homeland, national glories, and the Napoleonic victories, as if they were the beneficiaries. This identification with the master will make them applaud a sovereign or tyrant, an image of force and possession. While the bourgeois think about their interests, the people enthuse over military conquests, regardless of whether they are favorable or harmful to the nation. In religion, the people remain unconcerned for the theology and spirituality and invent the image of the good God, an expression of their submission."

"The assumption of the primacy of social life must be applied to all societies, however they are organized; it is not the social that proceeds from the political but rather the political that proceeds from the social. But if the force of collectivity is originally immanent in society and emanates only from social activity, it can be appropriated, diverted from its source. Precisely because the collective force is the ever-renewed labor of organized people, not a tangible reality, it can monopolized, alienated, snatched from its authors. Politics is to social life what capital is to labor: an alienation of the collective force."

I still write on wordpress in the year 2025