If These Be Rebels, or...Here There Be Dragons

The idea that you can compromise with those who would rule you - who govern how you work and how you feed yourself -  and not end up compromised - this idea is more pernicious than the belief that history has a motive and a determined outcome.

For although historical determinism* has neutered radicalism, and often reduced its adherents to astrologers of economic night skies, the acceptance of it does not negate the fundamentally necessary rejection of the order of the world which consumes you so that others might live. A person may wrongly believe that history is teleology, and still at the minimum live as if this history, as if this current arrangement of persons and events, ought not persist.

But.

If you do not reject the domination of your life, however impersonal and routinized it might seem, however out of reach the levers of control, you can only in the end suffer it bitterly, or resign yourself to a crippled awareness of your impotence. Pretending that there are no social spaces free of the dominant mode of life is not only moral self-betrayal, it is the recognition that you are not and should not be the sort or kind of person to undertake the risk of rebellion.

Worrying your escape, you will never rebel.

You do not change the world by telling yourself or others that you cannot escape its effects. Everything is always contingent, anyway. There's never going to be an escape. You don't even look for it. You don't worry it. You don't waste time - yours or others - trying to redeem the coupon for it. There is no standing outside of experience. That is mysticism. A fool's errand. Always embedded in your own events, and in the wake of them, you can and must realize that there is no other, no else, no option which is not yet closed to you.

This is it. To change it, you must say, "No!"

If you stop at the contingencies which bind you, you will live a life which betrays itself, which gives lifeblood to those who rule. You betray the lives of all who depend upon you. You betray the voiceless.

And, if you encounter those so-called allies who say they share your goals, but refuse to say that "no" in a clear and public voice, they will have no loyalty when it counts. You can count on it. They'll be looking for clean social spaces, toleration, cafe mocha and the latent "revolutionary" symbolism in a film produced to make someone richer.

If they cannot say "no" to this latest, predictable example of an obvious human evil, they cannot be trusted. They are the latter day farce of tragic mystical and scholastic Papistry, scrutinizing the firmament of power for signs and wonders, looking for reconciliation when they ought to be planning how to take down the gates of heaven itself. They will not be there when it matters. They'll be buying their escapes, cooing in soothing voices of passive aggression.

And if, having watched or learned of all that passed in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Vietnam, in Chile, in Honduras, in Guatemala they can still identify with American military power, you have all you need to know about who and what they are. If they can ignore how Qadaffi got his guns, his oil concessions and his reconciliation with London, Paris and Washington, if they can use the royal we to laud the "humanitarian" murder of innocents, you know their quality.

Especially if they're nuanced, thoughtful and nice about it.



* - though never as deleterious as cultural studies Zizekism or academia itself...