What is the greatest act of political revolution? To cease being yourself.
Joining political movements, solidarity amongst the disenfranchised, acts of terrorism and violence, they will continuously come short of their goals. History of the past 150 years have told that story much better than I. Do we even really know our transgressors anymore? There is no longer a boss to strike against but only pathetic lackeys of the management class, that deserve pity sooner than revolt; the state dissolves daily under the pressure of globalized capitalism's transnational corporations and no longer does it make sense to hold your own government accountable for what are now global problems, far outreaching the abilities of the state; our "comrades" are hungry imbeciles assembling poisonous toys for our children in the pursuit of an anonymous currency. Knowledge, where once a bringer of enlightenment and freedom, is now revealed as the cruel servant of vicious powers that extend the vision and space of exercised power.
Power and the powerful are vanishing horizons rapidly disappearing, and we are the senseless cartographers scrambling to capture the outlines of our enemies. But we can still grasp one thing in the darkness and revolt against it -- the self. One's own identity, the self, the I is taken traditionally to be natural manifestation of an essence; originally, a person's essence came from the Christian notion of the soul, now, in the age of Scientism, the new, unbridled dogmatism births identity from the genome. The resulting layperson's response to Scientism is that "I do these things because it's essentially my biological nature." This person, in his mind, cannot cease to be himself or herself; they are without control of their identity. They reject the call to cease to be yourself.
But biological essentialism cannot explain identity truly. Biology can explain why a human eats eggs instead of rocks, but it cannot explain why a person would choose to eat rocks instead of eggs. Biology and the rigorous sciences wrongly assume that their development and success have been the death knell and eventual destruction of philosophy or Wissenschaft (i.e. soft science). Biology is limited by material facts which are finite, and must have ideally one causal explanation to remain rigorous and objective; the rigorous sciences will, given enough time, develop an ultimate mathematical theorem to explain everything, ending science, but an unwritten conclusion of the theorem will be it was written. The conclusion of science in its final, complete theorem will end with drinking and conversation -- philosophy in its purest mode!
Identity is comprised of the accidents, the choices, of history and culture. Identity has no natural history, but rather, it is a secondary physical reality, a mode of the material, that exists in a near imperceptible way between people that offers no proper quantities to be measured. As the qualitative experience of a color does not make itself measurable to science, history and its resulting formation of identity is qualitatively relational and does not offer itself up to a rigorous science.
(More to come -- like a good torturer I add an artistic pause between the pain)
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