Do we really want out?

R

RWY

Well-known member
My issue is not so much that they benefit from the system (although obviously they do), if someone has managed to find a way of making a living from writing and selling books then good for them. My issue is that in order to do so, they deploy this totalising high-mindedness with regards to their political positions: that the entire capitalist system is to be despised, opposed, fought and somehow overcome through the sole deployment of their intellectual thought. It's absolutely ridiculous and bears no relation to reality, which leads to my second point: if all this activity (their writing, their activism, their books) has no actual political effects (the complete collapse of the Corbyn project should be enough evidence that the influence of a decade's worth of their thinking on politics in Britain was either negligible or, perhaps, even had a negative effect), then what is the point of it all other than to prop up their own careers?
 
Last edited:
woops

woops

is not like other people
version said:
Yeah, this was what I was referring to when I asked whether we really want out. If we enjoy discussing how we can't get out, do we actually want out?
Click to expand...
if we want out but we can't get out wouldn't we end up discussing that a lot
 
R

RWY

Well-known member
version said:
If we enjoy discussing how we can't get out, do we actually want out?
Click to expand...
"While these people bustled into factories, or were driven into them, building themselves more rigidly and irretrievably into a mechanical urban life, they exploded in dreams of bucolic "freedom." Pictures of the "freedom" of the noble savage and the child of nature excited them to a great outburst at the very moment when (as they must from their own point of view have regarded it had they not been so full of a false and exotic emotion) they were enslaving themselves more thoroughly to men. So it has been in the name of nature always that men have combined to overthrow the natural in themselves.

For their instinct to be so fallible, where, it would seem, so much is at stake for them — for them to proclaim so ardently that they wish to be "free" and nature's children, and yet, in effect, to carry through great movements that result in an absolute mechanization of their life — can only mean one thing. It must mean that they do not really know what they want, that they do not, in their heart, desire "freedom" or anything of the sort. "Freedom" postulates a relatively solitary life: and the majority of people are extremely gregarious. A disciplined, well-policed, herd-life is what they most desire. The "naturalistic" form that eighteenth-century revolution took was because all violent revolution is saturnalian. A rare saturnalia is necessary for most people, but it exhausts their passions, and the rest of the year they are anything but their saturnalian selves. The few years of youth is such a saturnalia: but youth, in that case, is not synonymous with life.

That men should think they wish to be free, the origin of this grave and universal mistake, is the (usually quite weak) primitive animal in them coming into his own for a moment. It is a restless, solitary ghost in them that in idle moments they turn to. The mistake can be best appreciated, perhaps, by examining a great holiday crowd. How can these masses of slowly, painfully, moving people find any enjoyment in such immense stuffy discomfort, petty friction, and unprofitable fatigue, you may ask yourself as you watch them. They ask themselves that, too, no doubt, most of them. That is the saturnalian, libertarian, rebellious self that asserts itself for a moment. But if they have to choose between what ultimately the suggestions of the "free" self, and the far steadier, stronger impulse of the gregarious, town-loving, mechanical self, would lead to, they invariably choose the latter. So to be "free" for one person is not what to be "free" for another would be. Most people's favourite spot in "nature" is to be found in the body of another person, or in the mind of another person, not in meadows, plains, woods, and trees. They depend for their stimulus on people, not things. So inevitably they are not "free" nor have any wish to be, in the lonely, "independent," wild, romantic, rousseauesque way. In short, the last thing they wish for is to be free. They wish to pretend to be "free" once a week, or once a month. To be free all the time would be an appalling prospect for them. And they prefer "freedom" to take a violent, super-real, and sensational form. They are not to the manner born where "freedom" is concerned; and so invariably overplay it, when they affect it." - Wyndham Lewis
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top