Our Freedom

We have cast off all the gods and their tyrannical ways, and hence all need of submission. Thus we define our freedom. And thus, having rejected the notion that there are gods, which is to say aspirations and ideals beyond our present limits, we happily submit to our own chains, rejecting all thought of anything beyond ourselves, which is to say beyond our needs and pleasures of this moment. We explain our self-enslavement with quaint notions such as “being comfortable in one’s skin,” which is to say that our skin itself, the immediate limit of our materiality, has become the inescapable cocoon and prison of our soul.

Having dispensed with all unchanging standards or aims of life, liberating ourselves from the constrictive regime of universal human nature, we are at last free to do as we wish, with nothing but the urge or whim of any moment as our guiding light. Hence we all freely desire and choose the same things, though in seasonal colors; and in our freedom we mock and damn all those who dare not to join our universal sameness, or who forget to change colors with the season.

In our age of the exaltation of choice and of non-judgmental differences, we all choose comfort and pleasure over discomfort and pain, acceptance and belonging over resistance and isolation, satisfaction over longing, and ready-made answers over the perplexity of the lifelong quest.

We have mocked reverence and admiration out of all consideration, in the name of equality and relativity, thus demeaning and discrediting all faith in gods and all awe before heroic greatness. We fill this void, or rather deny that any void need result from our dismissal of reverence and admiration, by revering self-help gurus and fame-mongering profiteers of all sorts, from the political to the pornographic, who promise easy joy, easy wealth, or easy ease, if only we adhere to their offerings without judgment or doubt.


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