Without Consolation

How does power so often soften or defuse the impulse to rebel, to resist?

It consoles. It tolerates reforms, and reformers who work for reconciliation.

Used against insurrection, against the urge to resist, insidious consolation puts desire to rest. Indirect, conciliatory and soothing, commiseration deprives a person of the boundary between insult suffered and injustice felt; it  removes the border and negates the difference between the injury and experience of it, treating the wound as a personal obstacle to overcome, to leave behind, to set aside, to forget. It seals the insult, or the injury, in a sarcophagus of memory, insulating it against the present. When consoled - when we accept consolation - we submit to a demand to pretend we cannot remember. We agree, in the receipt of pity and consolation, to lay down our grievances.

A revolutionary, a rebel, a reformer whose goal looks like consolation may not believe he serves the powers which offend him, but he does. The grievance, the insult, the injury, the oppression - these we must hold, must shield against the desire to console, to receive consolation. Trust no "rebel" who places a high value on the making of amends, on consolation - he looks like a priest because he acts like a priest, a mediator of disputes, a prophet of peace and conciliation.

Consolation deadens because we must insist on our own error, our own agreement to injury, in order to overcome it. Receive the embrace of the seducing peddler of consolation, and you accept, in certain terms, the admission of defeat, of surrender.

Resist consolation. Live without it. Accept no reconciliation.

Without consolation - refusing all mercy - the revolutionary life...