In June, Tomás died at the age of 24. He had been showing me Richard Wright haikus, teaching me how to think about them, and how to enjoy them. I was just starting to get it.
So many horrible, old, untalented people continued to live, and Tomás, the poet, was dead. I wasn’t angry. I couldn’t even make enough sense of things to construct the logic for anger. If I continued to live, I would have to watch more people die: in all probability most of my friends and community (who were older than me on average), most or all my coworkers, mentors, and especially my parents. Parents are the primary group who we children, from birth, must prepare to witness die, for there is a universal law that no parent should ever watch their child die.
I wrote to Tomás’s family offering my condolences, and his mother called me back, proving that even this law of the universe was unfaithfully defended. Everything was fucked up. I could not see a future free of unbearable pain. My government was legally kidnapping people on the street. They were being held in a penal colony just eleven miles away from the raucous World Cup Finals in New York City. The MetLife stands were themselves insidiously hawked by DHS agents, as Trump had aggressively refused to decrease ICE presence during the festivities. The circus was in town. It had been authorized by the state.
Crowds of people spilled into the streets stopping traffic, just to look through windows and over shoulders at the games unfolding. I was surrounded daily by surreal joy in which I was painfully unable to participate. By then, the fourth plea letter had come out of the facility and the captive people were still on a hunger strike due to inhumane conditions. What kind of torture must one face to refuse food inside prison? It is one of the very last things afforded.
Every person in the world suddenly became naked to me. All I could see on their faces was unbearable pain. Every single living person, past, present and future experiences the worst pain imaginable to themselves. We are all unbearably transformed by it. We are shaped by it in all our parts. As such, cynicism is a very severe and yet rational framework of thought which provides the essential premise to justify true suicidality (spiritual or physical or both). This is the final, and most important enabling condition of fascism.
Fascism is a problem of hopelessness. It is a type of system failure which occurs when self-worth is unstable enough to be co-opted by movements of blind faith, con-promises of protection and acceptance. Fascism’s formation requires ultranationalist and xenophobic violence, but those things are beside the point. Xenophobia is simply embodied as an age-old vehicle for fear of the unknown. They are simply excuses to farm fear to aggregate power. It is a problem of surreal scale and focus which allows brutality to continue unquestioned. We are being traumatized. We are being numbed. We are dying. Part of what’s interesting about the Delaney Hall letters is how repetitive they are and much you want to look away. But the nature of the problem does not often change. It is age old. We are bored of it.
I understand now, how ordinary people like myself come to condone fascism. The more interesting question is: How do ordinary people stop fascism? Or in other words, how do ordinary people continually defend and justify human freedom and human beauty and human equality, when the material reality of those ideals has never existed for everyone at once? How do we reason with the existence of human rights, which we claim to deserve, and yet (so far) cannot faithfully implement? How do we argue for the equal value of every human soul, knowing of course that their treatment on Earth will be so unequal and for many, wretched beyond belief. How do we transcend cynicism which is a factual account of reality?
We must break from the illusion of rationality and reality. “Everything is fucked up,” while always rationally defensible as a worldview, depletes the imagination of the materials required to construct a livable moment that exists after this one. The fact is, the future is looking really bleak, and we can see that reality abides by no humane rules. There is no such thing as human dignity. You cannot touch it. It was not here before we were like the ocean or the sky. It is only a promise we make for each other out of the self-aggrandizing species-level delusion called love.
To deny fascism, one must first agree to the terms of life. Life is pain. Life cannot be without pain. Human liberty and self-determination only allow one the full dignity of their own pain. The goal is not to end all individual instances of hatred, fear, death and pain. The most common misconception about anarchists is that they oppose coercion and hierarchy existing between two individuals. An anarchist’s ideal world contains racist people, because any power capable of eradicating racist thoughts should never exist. To end all individual hatred would require a set of laws which could be used to arbitrarily accept or reject any behavior based on the moral code of the singular governing authority. Once this infrastructure for power exists (for example, in the form of a state), such power can never be wielded without warping he who wields it beyond insanity, beyond death. Such aggregated force simply cannot be wielded: Not by the left, not by the right. No such moderation exists in aggregates of humanity.
The establishment and continued survival of such authority would require an enforcing body (such as a police force and judicial system) which is capable of destroying the freedom of the citizen, and even to convince her that such spiritual (or physical) death is acceptable.
As anarchists, the only thing we ask is for our pain to belong to us. We must claim it. Fanon understands this: On a personal level there is an essential continuity between individual transcendence and collective action. Individual self-worth, in the system which denies the beauty and freedom of every person, must be retrieved through revolutionary action, that is, an act which challenges the rational and real state of a society defined by power. Fanon explains through several case studies during his years as a psychologist the psychic damage endured by ordinary people living bent to power. In such a system the pain endured is not ours because the force used to make objects of people is not wielded precisely by our selves. It has been endowed to us against our own will. Who of us would choose to subjugate the other? The pain we feel from killing each other like this: We cannot possibly claim it. So instead, we must seek the pain we ourselves can claim. The pain which belongs to us, which in turn becomes our own responsibility: the pain of freedom.
Freedom is pain. Human liberty and self-determination are painful contradictions. They are standards we humans invented in a religious fervor which arbitrarily values each human soul ultimately and equally, and insists on unnatural conditions which have never yet existed. Allow yourself to be marked by pain. Violence is a cleansing force. Wield violence against the tired acceptance of the continued horrors of everyday life. It is attractive to stop at erotic day-dreaming: the desire for things to change. But desire for things to be better is used as a temporary, auxiliary channel for the storage of human goodness. We must not stop there. Past the desire, one must achieve, through will, discipline, and violent reclamation of pain, the truly embodied feeling that it is actually possible for the future to be better than the past. Only then, can the revolution begin.
