Yesterday I was reading an opinion which was basically a warning about
believing the farse of counteracting terrorism. It gave some reasons
about why people would turn to terrorism, remarking the poor
socioeconomical opportunities and the western colonization project.
While most of the people reduce the reasons to religion, it wasn't
mentioned in the opinion referenced, with which I agree, because
religion is the moral end, the enclosure of the whole act, not the
catalyzer; in fact, the act seems to justify their religion, not satisfy
it. While from a different angle morals (religion) would seem to be the
base of every action, it is all the opposite: morals are 'higher' or
rather 'outer' from us, we serve them for the sake of having them make
sense.
Now this post is not about terrorism, religion or morals (tho one or
more of these will creep in and intertwine with other topics). The
reading from yesterday led me to think about the fact that we humans are
very... well... human; we are subject to manipulation of our psyche and
hence our emotions (which to me are of a 'higher' complexity than the
psyche and, in fact, it's product). Let's understand psyche as the
traits of an individual mind in contact with both their inside ('their
very nature') and their outside (the social), which are ultimately
flowing together in a cycle, leaving some surplus or more like repressed
content into the unconscious, which can and do give birth to a
personality (individuation) which has emotions (affective needs) that
come from deep repressed content.
Thing is: the whole political system in progress and what is planned for
the near future is very interested in that vulnerability and in keeping
our affective needs, and by means of it our fragile individuation keeps
seeking identification, and I found out that's the most vulnerable part
of us. Think about how a sense of membership is promoted: nations,
ideologies, religion, even global/free market, atheism... Even nihilism
is kinda promoted as a choice for being a member of. And not only that -
let's just think about how culture has given us cheap membership
choices through music, art, clothes, etc. ultimately selling us values
and ideologies of the more classic kind, only that through a more
complex means. With "cheap" I mean literally cheap, since it's cheaper
to get to ideologies by means of culture, memes, comics, fashion, etc.
All for the sake of identification.
All this process, meanwhile, is for the sake of keeping power relations
up. There is no need to get further from there since the point of this
post is to focus on our own freedom, and the way I think it should or
could be achieved is merely my personal opinion. My aim is to, by
telling how I imagine freedom would be for us, open a space from now to
then that can be filled with all sorts of ideas about how it could be
achieved. It is a very used by me brain hack to imagine myself on a
point I want to reach and my current position will just be attracted to
that point; thinking about a line dot by dot can get one tired.
Alright - I was all about the most vulnerable trait of us: the need for
identification. Even emotions like love are all about identification...
with the other, with a family, etc. All are looking for rock-hard
objects of identification. Let's understand that there's no actual line
between subject and object/private and public/inside and outside
anymore, identification means both identification of me and the
other/object at the same time; I am in relation and opposition to the
thing, not any other way. From my point of view, I consider the focus
has been going from emotions directly to the very personality: we are
now living a collective (but lived individually) existential crisis, for
which we have filled ourselves with a zillion ways of identifying.
That's our invisible, intangible cage.
But what about the initial question? What is freedom like? Apart
from the benefits we all foresee for the collective when we reach a
better political status, what is next from it? Freedom is to me be less
human in the sense of leaving behind all the social-based fears, all
those scars by political subordination, spiritual discouragement,
affective needs, dreams of institutions like the family... There's no
need to encourage all those romantic views about our existence. Our
freedom will look more sterile: less demand of production of objects for
identification. A focus on the raw experience, less ideologies, no need
of a god (either approval or denial), no nostalgia, no trauma, no
individuation, no sides, just a wide range of shades, just a strong
empathy and conjoining with the other. The total destruction of the
individual (meaning the destruction of the lines that separate us from
others and environment). The total destruction of emotions, a brand new
way of perceiving what we actually meant with happiness. The total
destruction of the human, which most of people are too attached to to
leave behind.
I lost the trail when positing the question, naturally. I think the
question, by now, should be changed to "What can joint this final
imagined stage with our current actual stage?" and I would even add: Do
we have to wait or can we start doing it ourselves?
There's this common (and correct) idea about language being the most
characteristic trait of a human. I think that, after the obvious changes
we all are expecting from freedom, and after the changes I proposed,
the very first thing to evolve will be our way to communicate.