Are you Free? All us Inmates

I will tell you the story of the Man of Void and of the Lady of Fire.

Long ago in the future.... In the last days of the Empire an attempt was made by men and women of science to escape the constraints of Planet Earth and limits of the biosphere. If it did not fail, then the result might have been Man of Void and Lady of Fire.

Man of Void is a mythic representation of the ultimate test of freedom; the ability to walk away, to travel freely.

Lady of Fire is a mythic representation of the ultimate path to freedom; the decision to take responsibility for ones own life, to be "a light unto yourself" (to steal from Krishnamurti) and to act by your own volition.

Imagine two men. They step into a ring and begin to throw punches. If they do this voluntarily, then we would call it a boxing match. But if they do not do it voluntarily, if they are unable to choose whether they start or stop, because of outside compulsion by others, then we would consider it torture.

Imagine a small child, the mother says to the child, "Would you like to clean your room or clean the playroom?" The child does not realize, that by engaging with their mother's question they have given up their freedom. Few of us would consider this malicious, because it is the job of a mother to teach and manage the child until they are able to make such decisions for themselves. But once we are no longer children, this process should cease. But what happens when we are given such false choices by Kings and Prime Ministers and Presidents? Are we not still children being given false choices?

The restriction of volition and mobility is domestication writ large. We have made pets of ourselves. And of course pets and animals kept in zoos live longer than those in the wild. With humans, it took some 2,000 years before this was true. We have packed humans into such sardine dense cities that the transmittable diseases are appalling. Only the advent of modern medicine leveled the playing field, allowing the civilized human to live longer than their wild counterpart. But what good is a long life if you hate it? And yet, we fear the end of life- even the end of a life of torment. Even with the rise of suicide as a feature of modern culture, most of us fear death more than a life we have to medicate ourselves (whether by alcohol or tobacco or marijuana or actual anti-depressants) to endure.

And so our Kings and Emperors use that fear of death in order to extract our submission, to push us into the field and factory and make us work for their benefit. It is this fear to take ownership of our life that is used against us to restrict our volition and our ability to move freely.

The good person may now object that we have an obligation, a duty, to do our share. But this isn't true. A duty or obligation springs from an voluntary agreement. We have twisted this in the modern usage, trying to pretend that duties can be inescapable. What is this but slavery? To be a duty, to be an obligation in contractual sense of the word, both parties must have entered the agreement of their own free will. To say that because one was born within these borders, in a world made of nothing but borders, that one is then obligated to participate as a member of this group; this is still merely slavery disguised. To abstain must remain a genuine option in order for participation to be in any way free.

I can hear the protests now. The land would be filled with freeloaders! Nothing would get done! Then I ask a question. If the work ordered by the Empire is so odious that no free person would do it, why should it be protected? If, for three million years humans were able to find enough people to do what must be done, what have we done so wrong in the last ten thousand? Why, for three million years was the voluntary participation of free peoples enough, and in the last ten thousand years only the forced participation by slaves would suffice?

And why also does the slave defend the slave master? Has the master so completely and effectively removed the slaves ability to stand alone that the slave cannot imagine life without the master? If the master is gone, who will whip me and make me work? Are these the questions we are reduced to asking, as we pretend that we are free men and free women? Perhaps we need better questions.


Life is Short.
Work is Crap.
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