A Must-Read for all the Radicals

On the Edge of Civilization

I have lived life wrongly. I lived in a world of ecstasy; in a world where people are judged by the clothes they wear. I have lived in a society of bigots; bigots who won’t in any way are willing to admit that they live in a world so befouled by senseless achievements, so stagnated in the filth of what they perceive as sustainable development, in a world so rotten by the decaying corpses of dead aspirations and a world burning in the fire of greed, come about by the loss of faith in the minds of the people and the taking over of money and power in its place. Yes, they have forgotten their Gods, damned their religions and became the instruments of evil. Yet they have cloaked themselves with false imagery of God. They seem to think that they respect God, that the God is the very reason for their existence, and that they bow their heads to show that they fear God’s might but in reality, they bow for naught but their own pleasures, their own self interests. The people in the society bow their heads as a bribe to God to hear their prayers and heed them. They never cease, from their pathetic excuse of a life, to take a moment out, and realize for once, what the ideals of religion truly are. Yes, their lives are pathetic. The people seem to think their lives are too different than the dogs and the beasts that roam the Earth without purpose when in truth they are the dogs, they are the beasts because they have no purpose, because they have let their purpose been taken over by something as imprudent and shallow as money.

I cast myself away from the society, not because I’m too weak for it, but because I’m too strong for it. If I get on my terms with them, they will come to the point of extinction. If I so much as reveal my ideals to them, my way of life to them, my philosophies to them, their heads will eviscerate from their bodies and they will die a painful death. They will watch in horror, as their brain breaks out from their skull, trickles down like red lava from their face and drop by drop meets the ground on which they stand. Their minds will erupt like a volcanic explosion because my knowledge and my intellect is too great a power for them to wield. The society has made itself weak, pregnable to degeneration. They have focused so hard on surviving that they have forgotten the meaning of living. And now it is all that they’re good for, to survive, like rats and cockroaches. They have, against all odds of nature, actually reversed the dogma and took themselves years back on the path to evolution. They did so by enslaving themselves voluntarily under the lust for power, and the craving for what they believe to be happiness. They see happiness in fine houses, hotel dinners, vacations to exotic retreats, clothing of the most fashionable trends, and most of all, to have power over other men. This is what they perceive happiness as, nothing more and nothing less.

Yes, I am a man who wears ordinary clothes no different from a street vendor, a bus driver or a servant but my back is firm and straight in these clothes. Yes, I wear old and worn out sandals on my feet but I walk on my feet with those sandals while the people around me walk on their knees even though they have the most expensive and most exclusive shoes on their feet. But I am as happy in my ordinary clothes and my worn out sandals as any man in a suit and Italian boots will never be. People think just because I threw my future away and I don’t care about power, don’t care about money that I am weak when au contraire I am stronger than the whole society. While the whole society is just a slave to the much bigger system, I mock the system. The system hates me; it despises my freedom and my independence. It wants me to be a slave under him like the rest of the people in the society. That is why it uses society as an instrument to hurt me, to insult me, to besmirch my wise philosophies, to diminish and slay my morale. It uses the people I love the most, people I trust to convince me psychologically that I am weak, that I am going in the wrong direction. Sometimes the system succeeds in breaking me and these are times I feel sad. But my feud with the system is not just a battle; it’s a never ending war. It is never-ending because neither will the system die nor I. My body may wither after some years but it is said that a man actually dies twice. Once is when his soul leaves his body and the other is when his name is said for the last time in the world. The death of the latter kind will never happen to me. I do not care if I fall as long as there is someone else to pick up the flag and keep the fight going on.

The society is a curse on the world, to the other living beings of the world and upon itself. It is so consumed by greed and hedonism that it destroys the world it’s in, the other beings around it and in this manner, they also destroy themselves. This is the world I live in, where right and wrong are just words of mouth. Potentially, the society is starkly wrong. It is everything the dictionary defines as evil and malicious. The people in the society come under the definition of scavengers, who snatch what they can get out of the little miserable lives they have and then die trying to give their sons a better future. They do not know that the only thing they are giving to their sons is a disease, because living in the society, in itself is a disease, a disease of which I am cured. I may suffer from ailments like cough and cold every now and then but I thank heavens that I am free from the disease that plagues all men and women. This is not supposed to be the state. It has become the state because you let it be. You let yourselves be shacked like sub-humans and gave away, your minds away, your thoughts away, your dreams away, your lives away to cross the finish line in the race of life. What, in the end, was the purpose of this race? Why did you choose to run when you could have walked, wandered off and discovered the greener pastures of life, the unknown terrains filled with breathtaking and momentous secrets, mystifying secrets that would have teased the innate thirst for knowledge in humans? What made the society run like animal right from the instant each of them take birth in this world? It’s because society is full of animals. No matter how much it evolves, it will always be animalistic, gory. It will never come to my expectations. The society is so weak because it lives in a contradiction. Mankind thinks they are the most powerful beings on Earth when they are clearly the most degenerative and self-damaging. It is this contradiction that makes mankind so weak. They fail to accept their shortcomings.

From a moment a child is born, he is taught that he can have anything in the world if he wishes so. This promise, which is unconditional to him at the beginning, becomes conditional as he grows. He is promised to have all the pleasures of a fine living if he works hard enough for it. It is in this stage that he starts to compromise on whatever he can get. If not the finest grades, one step down, if not the finest education, one step down. Then, the status quo changes and he is forced to work hard because if he doesn’t, he cannot even get the bare minimum. And after it’s too late, he realizes that he has become just another hamster in a wheel, a wheel which he has to run in for life and after his death, his children will take up his place. He realizes that he is just another cog in the machinery of the system. Yes, you are dominated by the evil of system. But it is not a devil with a face, or even a form. The devil of system is a cipher. We created this demon. We created him by organizing ourselves structurally. We humans lost faith in chaos, forgetting the fact that it was chaos in the first place that created the wonder of Universe and in it our world, Earth. There was no system involved in the creation of universe. It was just a matter of chance. To render this demon to an end, we have to leave everything to chance and stop the madness that the society calls ‘sophistication’. But the society, the civilization or mankind is too engulfed by mindless bliss to understand de facto. We keep guards and appoint ministers to defend humanity but as the old Latin proverb goes Quis Custodiet ipsos custodies meaning who will guard the guard themselves? The problem lies in human obsession with power and it will end when mankind will see power for the last time. This will be the power that decimates mankind leaving no survivors whatsoever.

 I am the prophet of mankind. I have made my prophecy and given my solution. It is on their best interest should they choose to prevail or die in their ignorance and vanity. The society has always been vain. It has always made the wrong choice, glorifying the wrong kind of people and giving power to the wrong kind of ideology. Mankind still thinks it is developing, gaining more power, becoming more and more prosperous and happy. I say to the mankind, “Rats, live you bliss for your time is near!” I won’t break the bubble of their unconsciousness for I would seem profoundly rude in doing so. As Dostoevsky said, ‘Let the world go to hell, I’ll have my cup of tea’. I don’t have hops for the survival of the society. I don’t have fears or care for the calamity that it faces. It has failed to rise to something good and now it will sink into the ground just because it couldn’t adapt itself to the freedom of the skies, it couldn’t adapt and grow wings to save itself from the order of the system. I have. Mankind doesn’t know how to live in freedom. If we are given freedom, we fight among each other and then equivocate for order. We can’t live in both freedom and harmony. For harmony, we need discipline and discipline is an arrested freedom. And an arrested freedom is the worst kind of slavery. And that is what humankind is going through right now. They are enslaved in the worst of forms. They actually think they are free when it is imminent their hands are tied by fate, by order, by discipline. Chaos has no place in their lives. Chaos is how I live. Anarchy is how I live. Anarchy doesn’t mean violence of the highest form. Anarchy means tranquility of the highest form. And when one lives in tranquility, it gives him chance to propagate his true self and enlighten his soul through philosophy, literature, ethics, religion and sociology among other things. These are subjects mankind never chose to invest in deeply. It always used ‘an easy way around’. It used scientific technology for its development without having the right intellect to handle technology. This ignorance proved technology to be a complete blunder rather than a boon.

In my ordinary clothes and old worn out sandals, I shall sit on an old wooden armchair, flex my legs a little, calmly put my hands behind my back and take my place on the edge of the cliff. This is the cliff from which mankind will take the leap. Where? Will it take the leap to an even higher form of intelligence? It would have if mankind showed intelligence in the first place. But all it has shown is tomfoolery. Contrary to what the popular belief is, the world is not cruel, it is mankind that has made the world this way. We have ourselves to blame. You have your society to blame but I don’t. I am cast astray from it. I have been what society would call ‘ambitionless’ because my only goal was to seek knowledge without seeking its fruits. I am also called ‘directionless’ because I fail to see through the eyes of the shackled society. They call me an ‘outlaw’ for I fail to see the point of the endless laws, guidelines and rules that dictate what I have to do and what I don’t have to. They called me ‘deranged’ as I live in a world of my own free from the vice and profligacy of mankind. I am none of those things yet I am all of those things. But what I am or am not is not in question where I stand because I stand at the tip of the cliff. This is the moment of judgment of mankind, the moment of truth. Naturally, human would chose to lie; even at this stage, as lying is innate in human character. So their judgment is done. This is a not done by a jury and I have no part in it. I am not the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, the appellant or the executioner. If I was anything, I was a partner in crime, when I was lost in the tribe of humanity. But now I have found a way out of it and by doing so, I have saved myself. This is my biography. I am a man standing on the edge of civilization whereas others have taken the leap and have fallen to the endless ever darkening abyss. I have wings of freedom and even though I had no tutor of flight or a launch pad, I have learned to fly and I fly away.