WSJ: “If prosecutors think that this will absolve them of the political implications of their decision to charge Mr. Trump, they fail to understand what they’ve unleashed… It was once unthinkable in America that the government’s awesome power of prosecution would be turned on a political opponent.”

🤔 Unthinkable? Or the essence of the Rule of Law? And actually, since Tricky Dick, a lot of thought (50 years worth) has gone into this question.

At the end of Dovzhenko’s 1930 film, a grieving father, Opanas, rejects a religious funeral for Vasyl, his murdered son. Instead, he calls upon the community to “sing new songs for a new life.” Secularism stands in triumph, penetrating almost every area of our lives, narrowed public displays of religious expression to strange circumscribed outbursts of joy and despair. Yet in death, especially in its final concrete form of animal desiccation, the symbolic meaning expressed as the final act and culmination of life, continues to be outsourced to religious authorities who are wholly unsuited to speak about our secular lives. It is a strange disconnect, a nod to tradition. It lacks a genuineness, the words conveyed seemed inauthentic. A secular body, stolen at the last minute and whisked inside the iron grasp of church to the dubious claim “only we have hallowed, consecrated grounds; only here has a body returned to its rightful place.” A modern man asserts his faith less from a sense of conviction but as a bandaid covering his fear of dying. It’s not enough to simply reject this religious formalism, to insist on a secular funeral which more often than not is simply families grieving in private. We have to create new traditions, a true secular funeral, one endorsed in the full light of public display, new songs for a new life.

“Goodness was lukewarm and light. It smelled of raw meat kept for too long. Without entirely rotting in spite of everything. It was freshened up from time to time, seasoned a little, enough to keep it a piece of lukewarm, quiet meat.”

“And soon she wouldn’t be able to tell if her impression of the morning had been real or just an idea.”

“She wanted even more: to be reborn always, to sever everything that she had learned, that she had seen, and inaugurate herself in new terrain where every tiny act had a meaning, where the air was breathed as if for the first time.”

“Nothing else can be created but revealed.”

Clarice Lispector.

“One might even say that his entire development consisted in jettisoning the constraints of doubt and irony and making the conscious, defiant ascent to dignity.”

Irony is also indicative of a certain psychological defense. A juvenile constraint to genuine self-expression pieced together by the discarded shards and frangible clay of civilization.

“On a personal level, too, art is life intensified: it delights more deeply, consumes more rapidly; it engraves the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventure on the countenance of its servant and in the long run, for all the monastic calm of his external existence, leads to self-indulgence, overrefinement, lethargy, and a restless curiosity that a lifetime of wild passions and pleasures could scarcely engender.”

“For passion, like crime, is antithetical to the smooth operation and prosperity of day-to-day existence, and can only welcome every loosening of the fabric of society, every upheaval and disaster in the world, since it can vaguely hope to profit thereby.”

One hears occasionally that the road to politics is a dead end. But a street implies two ends, not one. So from which end do we commence and from which end do we terminate? Let us call one end, for lack of a better term, Libertarian, an intuitive distrust of controlling authorities simultaneously perceived as both diffuse and pervasive, the hidden shackles lurking around slowly turning corners, the visible and invisible menace of our political Leviathan. At the same time, there exists a counter-current flowing from a second point rooted in the notion of civil society as the highest end of homo politicus. Let us call this other end, Republican in the Aristotelean sense, not the ideological sense.

The conflict between these two pillars of thought – Libertarian and Republican – is more protean, dynamic, and intractable than can be gleaned by the analogy of a simple street sign. The real danger lies not at both ends but crossing between, not a collapse into, but a compromise into authoritarianism. This ever present danger of a creeping authoritarianism is due to the fact that no modern political system is allowed to fail. Failure is not an option. The stakes are far too great. Yet, equally, no political system succeeds. Success, already limited by exigencies is rendered a blunt edge by the necessity of compromise, manifesting as the collective performance of political theatre in all its multiple variations and permutations, most notably seen in the constant drum beat, the ritual accusing/shunning/cleansing of the symbolic evil of partisanship.

Politics cannot save us from a descent into authoritarianism because politics creates the fruitful grounds in which war is waged. Given the intractable nature of the war, this desire to end politics once and for all is unsurprising. Less abstract, the allure of a strong arm always holds the promise of a swift and decisive victory by one side over the other. It is also why ideology is beside the point. Like the siren’s call, a new faith emerges, the transcendence of all political systems, the dream of utopia, but in reality, a proto-fascism.

It struck me that my writings (my children) will be largely misunderstood if they are read through the filter, lens, prism, etc. of essentialism. The style of my thinking permeates through with an anti-essentialist vibe. Do I believe in a unitary soul? No. Do I believe reality is monistic? No. Ideas such as qualitative multiplicity, schizophrenia, shamanism, rhizomes, many-worlds, anti-irony, anti-hyper realism, etc. find a natural home in my writings.

It is a fluid discourse, smooth before a beat skips, tonal asymmetries abound, Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty flashes. It’s not in praise of irrationalism but the necessity of breaking free from the ever-pervasive hyper-realism of modernity. Breaking free? My sunshiny optimism always slips out even in the worst moments of narrative or character disintegration. If not breaking free from the hyper-real, at least calling attention to it. The experience (even that connotes a unitary set theory) isn’t meant to be satisfying, or pleasant. More like a haunted house tour on a broken, rickety old mine cart.

Indeed, so much has my mind and thought rejected the essentialism of Platonic forms in their myriad of zombie manifestations (“straight because that’s the way nature intended” “male because gender is found within ones genitalia”) that I am often taken aback by those who proudly endorse such philosophical / pseudo-scientific dribble without shame. A lot of lives, dreams, hopes, and loves have been burned at the essentialist stake. I wish that was hyperbole, but essentialism, especially in its cruelest forms (e.g. religious zealotry and political fanaticism) has been responsible for bathing the earth in blood many times over.

Much of what is derided as cancel culture is simply anti-bullying, desperate people trying to stand up against the bromides of the strong against the weak, resist the brutal, amoral system which encourages meanness as both the right of the oppressor and a “proven” way to “toughen up” the weak by making them fit for cannon fodder. Even today, such abhorrent views are expressed as natural, common-sense, e.g., defending starvation and, by extension, starvation wages as a form of self-motivation, a way to squeeze the last drops out of the bloodless turnips that are the “lazy and coddled”.

If bullying kills, then stopping it saves lives. Not cancel culture. Saving lives.

I can’t stand it!

You mean this thing?

No, I mean that thing!

I don’t know where this idea began that there is a particular form of courage that consists of never censoring one’s ideas, thoughts, words, emotions, etc. in consideration of one’s audience. It seems to me that context IS everything. In fact it’s hard to imagine how to meaningfully express oneself outside of context. (There’s a finer philosophical point to be made about language, but for the purposes of this context, it’s not worth discussing in great detail.). No matter the level of abstraction, meaning forces a dialogue, a discourse, which requires further adjustment, correction, clarification, nuance, etc.

The truth is we don’t have the time to understand one another. Twitter makes it seem as if discussions take place outside of context. And indeed, the joy we feel upon learning of a new Twitter spat is trying to uncover the reasons that led to the dispute.

But of course I’m not drawing a hard line between self-editing and self-censorship, because I’m not really sure where or what that line is. For example, I would describe myself politically as progressive. But if I found myself among a group that is overwhelmingly conservative, I would refrain and decline from getting into political discussions because I generally don’t like to waste my time. Meaning is also survival, pleasure-seeking, avoidance of pain.

It’s painful to be misunderstood. Even more painful to be ignored. And more painful still to work to be better understood.

So the dream of liberation from self-censorship is also the dream of the carefree life. Where everything comes at no cost. And a lot of things in life come at little to no cost. So we can make a habit of never censoring ourselves. But it could be a bad habit, a lazy habit, the habit which treats discipline and effort as shackles.