Whoever appeals to the law against his fellow man is either a fool or a coward.
Whoever cannot take care of themselves without that law is both.
For a wounded man shall say to his assailant,
‘If I live, I will kill you. If I die, You are forgiven.’
Such is the rule of honour. – Lamb of God
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.”
“There are indeed natural slaves,” says one of the herd’s wisest priests. “Those whose bodies are strong, whose fires rage beyond the protective veil of civilization, whose instincts seek conflict and thrill in battle and deny the just and learned council of established tables of values, whose minds are indisciplined and unrestrained by the calm security of rationality – those who live without the stings of duty and guilt. These men,” says the wise one, “are those who MUST BE LED.”
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.
“What we’re interested in is how something works, functions – finding the machine. But the signifier’s still stuck in the question “What does it mean?” Indeed it’s this very question in a blocked form. But for us, the unconscious doesn’t mean anything, nor does language. Functionalism does rule, however, in the world of micro-multiplicities, micro-machines, desiring machines, molecular formations. On this level there isn’t this or that kind of machine, a linguistic machine, say, but linguistic elements along with other elements in all the machines. The unconscious is a micro-unconscious, it’s molecular, and schizo analysis is micro-analysis. The only question is how anything works, with its intensities, flows, processes, partial objects – none of which mean anything.” Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 21-22.
“There, where the State ends, only there begins the human being who is not superfluous; there begins the song of necessity, the unique and irreplaceable melody. There, where the State ends – look there, my brothers! Do you not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the übermensch?” Zarathustra, “On the New Idol.”
“To abandon our enslavement to truth – to have the force and courage to live with this world here and now! Happiness is the capacity or power to live one’s life actively – affirming the particularity or specificity of one’s moment in time. We live reactively, by contrast, if we try to find some true world above and beyond the world that appears to us. Nietzsche’s concepts strive to create multiple and diverse effects; a new mode or style of thinking.” Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, 19.
“All sick and sickly people strive instinctively for herd organization. Wherever there are herds it is the instinct of weakness that willed the herd and the cleverness of the priest that organized it.” Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, Third Treatise, Section 18.
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!
Derelict Space 