Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself — as though that were so necessary — that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground.
As every year goes by and my dread of coerced work increases, it seems to me increasingly true that Man has an element of Chaos that can never be subsumed under any plan, no matter how reasonable it may be. Have you ever had a curious thing you observed in your life, and then proceeded to search up if anyone had something to say about this, and then found it that it got subsumed into an idea, or a framework, things which can be manipulated by the mind and sort of ... kill the joy of discovery? When aspects of life become classified, they kind of become dull, squashed into something that "we" "know" and no longer need to inspect.
It seems to me that this instinct is a rather crucial part of the rebellion against order, the sense that Reality with an upper case 'R' is simply too big, mysterious, wild and vivid to be captured by the neat categories and structures of the mind, which are then instantiated into the pseudo-reality of society.
Perhaps that is why there are so many people who supposedly have an "attention deficit disorder", because there is a deep part of them that simply refuses to pay attention to a dull lesson in a dead classroom, and that deep down they know that life and learning are way more exciting than this, way more adventurous and embodied. As such, when people are coerced by someone else but don't have the means to outwardly rebel—say no, change things or leave—they can still decide to not pay attention, and to not care, by for instance procrastinating or doing the bare minimum at a job.
We could label this response as the flight response in the 4F's model of trauma, and the other major one in my own life has been the freeze response: a tiredness that "coincidentally" occurs every time you have to do something you really do not want. 8
And perhaps that flight response is also why some people would rather believe in their own reality, through conspiracy theories and fantasizing, than accepting the dull, "known" reality provided by our society, because the sense that there must be more to life is simply too strong to ignore, even if it can easily be misguided as in the case of conspiracy theories. In general, rebellion is rarely something that "makes sense" in the modern world, because reason, rationality and going with the flow of society are the precise things which are being rebelled against.
> All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.
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2024-07-22