Introverted social outsiders fortify their inner selves with philosophical reflections. Alienated
from the rest of the world by their self-absorption, they redeem themselves by
rebelling against monstrous nature, whether through
artistic expressions such as aesthetically meritorious acts of asceticism or through
prophetic calls for cultural renewal that periodically awaken the masses who
are held in thrall to the institutions dominated by predatorial, sociopathic alphas.
But do the tragically heroic omegas, those who are furthest
from being happy and who occupy a sort of cosmic vanguard, since all wise
primates are outsiders in their relation to the indifferent universe as a whole—I
say, do those enlightened few likewise have an obligation to rebel against the
alphas, to oppose theocracies, kleptocracies, or neoliberal plutocracies as so
many glorified biologically-driven dominance hierarchies that betray our
capacity for godlike creativity? If the diatribes of enlightened outsiders have
historically emboldened the domesticated human herds to seek to be more
spiritual than animalistic, even if those scraps of wisdom are then typically
misinterpreted and quickly coopted by the jealous gods themselves, by what C.
Wright Mills called the power elites, as in Catholicism and in all other major
religions, is that opposition to our corrupt “leaders” as important as that to
the undead wilderness? Moreover, is the latter
rebellion, which consists of technological and cultural re-enchantments and
vivifications of zombielike, robotic natural processes, displacing the wilderness
with artificial worlds embodying our intentions, purposes, and ideals and ironically
vindicating the ancient mythopoeic visions of a spirit world—I ask is
that rebellion not identical to the surreal means by which the sociopathic
alphas deify themselves? Specifically, isn’t technological creativity
consistent with the cancerous economics of infinite civilizational growth? Isn’t
hostility towards undead nature a premise in the satanic argument of modernity
and thus just one more metanarrative rationalizing the gross power inequalities
between those who control antinatural systems and those who are degraded in
their servitude to those systems? How, then, should the enlightened few
distinguish their doomed but honourable resistance from the alpha’s monuments
to hubris? Are alphas and omegas perhaps equally unwitting pawns in the grip of
monstrous nature so that true existential resistance
is impossible?
The Existential Context
To address these thorny questions, we must first consider
what the alpha rulers are actually up to. We can do this by placing alpha
behaviour in its existential context, that is, by determining how the power
elites deal with the broader, existential problem of human freedom. Our defining feature as persons is our ability to control
ourselves, which is to say that in contrast with other animal species, we build
up selves in the first place, a self being a mind that can detach from
biological and social regularities, thus acquiring the limited freedom to
direct its individual course. We’re not entirely free from nature or from society,
of course, although the effect of technology is indeed to render us
supernatural, to replace the natural landscapes with artificial ones that
facilitate our autonomy by allowing us more easily to carry out our will. We’re
still physical objects and are thus subject to physical forces and norms,
although we use airplanes and spaceships, for example, to overcome gravity.
Likewise, we’re masters of our reproductive process and thus aren’t as constrained
by natural selection as are the unknowing animals.
In any case, partial freedom from nature consists not of any
mythical, metaphysical or theological property, but of the building of an
ideological wall around ourselves which gives us the cognitive space to choose
how we should act. The wall fortifies us against some environmental pressures,
functioning like an event horizon, being the public form of ourselves which
encloses our innermost character. That character isn’t an immaterial entelechy
but a set of cherished ideas or sacred beliefs which are themselves remnants of
our formative acts of faith. Who we
really are is defined by what we genuinely, consciously or unconsciously
believe. We are just such thoughts and convictions, nothing more, and so we’re liberated when our deepest
thoughts are the primary or sole causes of our actions, when our worldview
is reflected in what we do so that instead of being merely a chapter in a larger
biological or sociological narrative, our life is self-scripted. Whereas the
members of most species act out their life cycle as organic vessels for their
genes, we’re persons in virtue of our having mental and thus more original,
even idiosyncratic control over what we do.
