On being free.
Interesting point made in the book When Elephants Weep, regarding freedom to choose as an essential source of animal happiness, an indescribable other element which no amount of food, water, light and warmth can satisfy. Freedom to occupy space, freedom to direct one’s own actions, refuse, resist or otherwise avoid compulsion.
To be compelled to do something is belittling. The difficult price to pay for inhabiting a shared, social group. Humans invented politics and religion to exert forms of control over one another, sometimes for the greater good. But power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And ‘with great power comes great responsibility’, two of my personal favourite maxims of all time.
Maturity to accept responsibility for one’s actions is very similiar to freedom, but it is not freedom, and at particular times in human history, when populaces are compelled to do or not do something, particularly something they like or are used to being able to do, they rebel. They feel incensed. In a small but ever present percentage of the population, a resistance will kick in that cannot be tamed, and would sooner annihilate itself than comply.
This truth will depopulate and destabilise sufficiently to enable a transfer of power. Forces that are not offered will be wrested away, and those who followed the leaders may find themselves permanently on the wrong side of the gates of their society. Deterrence, in the form of imprisonment, exists. As does soul-wearying labour, deliberate mental torture, coercive control, threats, intimidation, and violence.
The manner of one’s resistance to an overreach of power is very important as it may decide which side of the gate you fall when the light comes on and people leave the theatre.
You may discover that you have been misled, but others or by yourself. You may emerge as a phoenix from the ashes, complete with baby dragons on your naked shoulder. Who knows?
Baptisms of fire are just that. They burn away impurities. Leave the minerals of which you are composed. The same effect is true of moral heat, physical heat, passionate heat. These fires burn away things that would have held us back, kept us from surviving.
They are such gifts. If you can call being cauterised part way to healed then they are also medicinal.
Little threads that held your old self together may burn away in your inferno. They may release you from firm holds, solid prisons, encyclical despair, spells and fugue states…
Not everyone likes a flaming death cleanse. Although there is a family who will sell you it in powdered form to keep up their appearances. Many more than one, it seems. You do not have to be led down that path. You can resist. You have that power. You just have to remember that you do, and be prepared to accept the consequences of your choices.
anaesthete, october 2020.
