Actions Speak Louder Than Words
by markdyal
There is nothing more American than being in a guerrilla band in a civil war. (Francis Marion)
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There is nothing more American than being in a guerrilla band in a civil war. (Francis Marion)
On this momentous occasion we hope you take a minute to reflect on what you’ve learned and what you’re expected to carry with you as you leave these years behind. Think about the virtues – oh the virtues! – sometimes obvious because preached from a pulpit, but more often hidden between the words of what you were told to read, or in the smug, knowing glances of your peers. Think about the commitment to justice your schooling has provided, or the pride you’ll feel when you stand khakis-to-blouse with your fellow alumni to “make the world a better place” for failures and weaklings. Think about the wisdom that only seems to avail itself to the degraded and decaying. Think about getting to hide behind these virtues – hell, think about using them just as they were intended: as a shield against struggle, suffering, and strength. Think about a world hewn of hierarchy, danger, and privilege. Thanks to your education, that world is yours for the taking.
Can you imagine if this was all there is? Can you imagine if this shameful vision was enough for you? Forget those for whom it is enough. Forget the milieu and the form of life that expected you to be contented by such an ignoble existence. This day we share with you and your family is given no great value by the achievement that has brought us together but is instead animated by the promise written in your future, and in the life you are creating far from the institution from which time and passivity has granted your release.
For your future holds experiences – places and situations – in which sham virtues carry an extortionate cost; for you get to live as the tightrope walker, each step a matter of standing or falling. You get to live with bonds forged of blood and steel and bathed in pure love. Some men would kill for the honor.
For you, my brother, the puerile, corrosive, decadent life of cowardly virtues written only in ink, will never be enough. And for that, we congratulate you.
1. The State is an ecosystem designed to promote and sustain a very specific form of life.
2. One kills much more than a bureaucratic apparatus when one destroys the State.
Roots are certain/
So say the bourgeois profiteers as they ask you to buy into The Revolt.
They sell you roots to keep you from revolting.
After all, your money has no value amongst men who can’t be bought,
Or those who know that you can’t buy nobility.
/Sky is empty.
So becomes the body,
Cut loose on the frontline, the battles raging within: sloughing off the roots that connect it to nothing but the status quo.
The roots that demand submission to certainties that are only true to men who are beneath you,
To men who would sicken at the thought of your battles.
If what you do does not cripple the State – by which I mean it’s power to control you – then it does harm to your potential for freedom. For the State has only two functions at this point: to create as many hands as possible to pass currency from one subject to another, and to protect the various systems that allow those transactions.
Anything you do beyond actualizing and maximizing currency flows is transgression. A slave will suggest that the State also profits from our transgressions and thus rationalize its passive enslavement – less to the State than his own cowardice, in this case. And while this is true, it is also true that very few slaves ever get a taste of freedom; for unlike raptors and wolves, a slave will do anything to avoid bloodshed. The slave, it seems, values possession too highly, and this keeps his blood dancing happily to his master’s beat.
Meanwhile the raptors and wolves dance unchained around the flames of their burning fetters singing, “blood has no value unless it is spilled.”
You don’t strip men away from the herd by demanding that they think more excellently as herd animals. Any appeal to value or truth that leads beyond you and your pack is a trap placed in your path by a slave or his priestly overseers.
The dictatorship of the herd ensures that you only experience knowledge, violence, and human potentialities for creation from the perspective of politicians, merchants, and priests; and rightly so: after all, imagine what might you know, will, or create without their shepherding!
“A line of flight neither to a new political-cultural alterity nor to a new form of political organization but instead to a radically new plane of consistency – to a new singularity and disaggregation of life’s potentials for assemblage and creation. This line of flight would be a movement of internal desertion, of an irreducibility to the bourgeois man and his heaven, of a total absence from State-Capital: indifferent to its values, ignorant of its provocations, and unresponsive to its stimuli. Autonomy! Desertion! Deserting family; deserting school; deserting the office, the army, the duty, the responsibility, the debt; deserting men, women, and citizen; deserting everything that holds us entrapped, enslaved, and entranced.” From High Mountains, “Becoming-Autonomy,” markdyal.com
Derelict Space 