In today’s (/7/12/110 Counterpunch.
To Rebél Against the Human Condition and Empire
The Key to a Happy Death
Read it.
Then try to live it.
Some excerpts follow:
What are the people of Germany doing? Sleeping. Their sleep is filled with nightmares and anxiety, but they are sleeping. We have awaited their awakening for so long, yet they continue to remain stolid, stubborn, and silent as to the crimes committed in their names, as if the entire world and its own destiny had become alien to them. All agree: the German people slumber on amid the twilight of their gods. They do not love liberty, because they hate criticism. That is why they are sleeping today.
Albert Camus, September 17, 1944
Albert Camus’s insightful description of life in Nazi Germany, which appeared in the clandestine Resistance newspaper Combat a few weeks after the Liberation of Paris, could just as well have been written about life in the United States today. Not unlike the people of Nazi Germany, the American people are also asleep.
We have slept through over two decades of technofascism–the melding of corporate, state, military, and technological power by a handful of political elites which enables them to manipulate and control most of the population. Technofascism has evolved into a global system of dominance and deceit in which ostensibly free individuals allow transnational megacompanies and big government to control their lives through money, markets, media, and technology resulting in the loss of political will, civil liberties, collective memory, and traditional culture. It includes, but is not limited to, affluenza, technomania, e-mania, megalomania, robotism, globalization, and imperialism.
While claiming to be individualists, we behave as world-class conformists. We think the same, share many of the same religious beliefs, vote the same, watch the same TV programs, visit the same websites, and buy the same low-priced Chinese plastic yuck from Wal-Mart. “All the women are strong, the men are all good looking, and all the children are above average,” just as they are in Garrison Keillor’s mythical Lake Wobegon. And we all pretend to be happy. But is it really true?
Even though we spend $10 trillion annually on consumer goods and services, $2.5 trillion of which is for health care, and billions more on spiritual gurus and religious shaman, are we as happy as we pretend to be? I think not, because what we are up against is the human condition, God’s gift to us in the Garden of Eden from which there is no escape – separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and death. Not a pretty sight. Our feel-good religious and spiritual leaders to whom we turn for solace try unsuccessfully to sugarcoat it. French existentialist Albert Camus called it absurd.
—snip—
Therefore, rebél against the human condition and the Empire, live life to the fullest, and try to die happy by mindfully defining your personal legacy, which some call your soul.
But Rebél is not for everyone, particularly not the faint of heart, for it offers no spiritual elixir or magic potion to relieve our existential pain. It is neither a fire insurance policy against hell, nor a ticket to heaven. It is not a touchy-feely, self-help, feel-good, be-happy philosophy promising pie-in-the-sky to its adherents. Religious fundamentalists, pacifists, and those in search of a spiritual nirvana are not likely to be drawn to Rebél. Although it may not be what we learned in Sunday School, it surely beats nothingness.
Rebél is about the peaceful denunciation, demystification, and defiance of the tyranny of ciphers. Its radical imperative involves disengagement, decryption, decentralization, downsizing, and dissolution.
In the meantime, Rebél!
Got the heart to do it?
Henry David Thoreau laid it all out quite clearly 150+ years ago:
Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union. Why do they not dissolve it themselves–the union between themselves and the State?
Got the heart to do it?
Start here.
NEWSTRIKE!!!
MEDIASTRIKE!!!
CULTURESTRIKE!!!
VAYA!!!
I dare ya.
Professor Naylor casts this as “The Key to a Happy Death.”
I prefer to call it the key to a happy life.
After all…y’cain’t have one widout t’other, kin ya?.
Nope.
Got the heart?
Start now.
I dare ya.
AG
