When making the mistake or humoring oneself with the insanity of engaging with a fundamentalist, meaning any person who asserts some static, all-encompassing “fact” about “the way life works”, it is important to keep a cool head. (Remember: It’s their job to be the triggered one.) It is important to not let the gunk in their brains being spewed out in verbal form hit you in the face and ruin your day; it is a must to keep a stream of replenishing water running through your passionate soul as the idiot before you is spouting gibberish arising from their faith in the dominant ideas, while your very lived nature disproves every commandment of their reality. Digest all the shit they give to you, say or do what you will to cleave their assurances into pieces, and walk away with nothing significant changed but some time wasted.
Life is thus because people have allowed rule in any capacity at any time. This is not meant in the strictly “political” or “social” sense. I mean also the moral sense, the communal sense, the conceptual sense, i.e., the conceptual bounds of what something or someone might be. Rule in all these senses is imposed on those going about their lives neither ruling nor eager to be ruled by those who hold power, but also by those who adhere to the grace and legitimacy of the power holders and property owners. Our neighbors, coworkers, etc., are not simply complicit, but active lieutenants in the longevity of the interlocking powers that comprise the existing order.
They may not have consciously done so, but their adherence to a series of “facts” about life that reduces everything to “the convenient way I want everything sorted” is a sacrifice of all palpable subjective matter that might make little if any sense to one — but contains all the fibers of felt observation and confirmation in another. It negates all that would negate harm and restriction on personal evolution, directing all social traffic into the fast lanes of delusion and systemic failure of those trusting in the whole thing. Being an everyday fundamentalist means succumbing to what has been set down, and somehow finding grace and fulfillment in this. “I am correct and good to have been assigned ‘male’, to not be transgender, to not be any ethnicity other than white, to believe in a singular male deity, to support capitalism, to love my country, to work a job, to have a wife and children, to have an expensive house and use fossil fuel vehicles. This is just how life should be.” The worst part about their fundamentalism is that it is not seen as such: It is simply “normal” to be persuaded of and content in all that the schools, the state, the church, the parents/guardians tell you. Those who diverge from this are the real fundamentalists for having eaten the forbidden fruit of Free Thought, now dwelling on the outskirts of what all the faithful build.
Those who have read me for a time, or know me personally, will know that I put no faith in any scientific method of arguing or pleading a position; if someone wants something to be true — then it is . . . For them. And the same goes for me and my “truth”. The very fact that this truth of the matter regarding these opposing truths goes unrecognized in the essentialist competition for “The REAL Truth” staggers any notion of getting beyond a myriad Duped Truths. (It is here where nihilism is the only option. There is nothing but a dead end when looking for external, perfectly assured truth. Truth that is true necessarily originates from, and abides and evolves, within.)
So own-truth, that glimmer in the deep caverns of myself which I may vocally confirm in such a way that negates perfect epistemological evidence for something — yet is perfectly confirmed or destroyed by my will — must triumph by the bite in its vocabulary and the self-preserving heartlessness in all it speaks and writes of. The sheer passion by which things are felt and known must overwhelm, like hordes of Vandals, the entire matrix of social, moral and conceptual “truth” that we are instructed to bow before. All these “truths” have been nothing more than heavy shackles on our legs in the hopes that we may surrender and be faithful as well without ever severing them. They have been anti-material barricades for all knowledge and reasoning that are actually helpful to our lives.
Something new yet verified by primal knowledge has to come about to effectively undo politics, society, “truth” and all the other devices of fundamentalism. It is only “new”, in the shadow of all that currently dominates by polite, fascistic dictates, to articulate something in such a way that disproves a sacred convention by its cadence and content, by its swift, victorious swipe across the throat of what is denying its own. (“My sacred Facts don’t give a rat’s ass about your feelings, experiences or insights!”) To articulate in the negative is to attack what imposes denial of self in the face of external “truth”; it is to attack the dominant reality with defiant, illegal reasonings that reason toward being dominated by no reason, by no persuasion which simply isn’t wanted.
For instance, I don’t want anything in my life that says I am bound to one unmovable gender-sex caste, and so I both defy this mandate of reality by doing what it purports to be impossible, and I vaporize its very existence from my life and help to do the same in my friends’. This is all done with the consistently repeated understanding that it is the participants in a reality that make it what it is. That this cannot be imposed, but soundly agreed on in order to be worth existing. It is this method that directly overcomes the stuffy, self-righteous horseshit of podcast pundits and desperate aging bigots milking every ounce of advertising revenue they can to crusade for their precious “reality”.
A negative assertion of what is sourced from an honest reading of history, a fair-natured look at realistic temperaments among would-be collaborators and a direct tackling of what actually generates problems is more likely to get somewhere than the rinsed and repeated bullshit of right-wing, left-wing, and all the other pro-political types desperate to maintain what cannot stand. We who actually consider complex things for a pastime know that there is no combination or duration of words that can stop every confused, heartbroken white kid from joining an active club to feel more like a powerful man of a downtrodden yet superior “race”; there is no artistic depiction of delusion that can stop someone from agreeing with people who argue the simple, classical epistemology of The Good Ole Days; there is no profound, universally agreeable set of words that can convince everyone around me to stop enabling their own abuse which also injures me. There is only the mania of fundamentalism in competition beneath the vibrant, conscious ascent of every audacious will against rule.
Ignited In Dark 