The Ought that haunts others

“Can I even express the quiet horror that debilitates my mind when I experience the utter vacuity of this work, of these pointless tasks I perform every day? Can I communicate this torment? Why would I? Perhaps because there is a statistical probability that I’m not the only one experiencing this, that there are many like me, who have to swallow the arrogant relativism of ‘you just had a bad day’ over and over again?

“What is society? The realm where we don’t know each other, and our interactions are nothing but the two insipid endpoints of the production process. We consume and we labor. We do our job. In this realm, you can ask or fight for a bigger share, you can shift the balance entirely to consuming if you are what they call ‘lucky’, but you can never ask for anything beyond that basic fact of death that this system has imposed on all life.

“In labor, I am doing the exact opposite of what I want, of all I could ever inspire to be: I am letting myself be exploited by agents of the system, and feel plagued by the cowardice that the illusion of total dependence has planted inside my mind. I sit here in my bedroom, gazing at a bright screen that lights up my corner. My body is warm, sometimes I feel happy, and I imagine being cut loose from the system, having conquered – not earned – the allowance to be myself. But the screen, the numbers, and the others – won’t go away. They will forever haunt me with their morality, which is nothing else than the sick child of bygone superstitions.

“Power means the ability to dictate the Ought that haunts others, and make them cut off the fragile threads of their budding freedom. I dream of the Overman as having overcome the murky edifice of representations that materializes power, having shattered it and replaced with halkyon truths that surpass even his most profound Oughts. Perhaps the Overman is a woman. How Nietzsche would have been misunderstood if that is what he meant.

“I don’t need to edit these texts because they are not texts. Because our culture is still – despite many brilliant processual thinkers and tinkerers – revolving entirely around products, final results that can be attributed a trade value, ownership, and function as the hard stitches of our social fabric. Imagine a book of poems that asks its reader to fill in certain gaps, to adjust rhyme and rhythm according to their taste, with a foreword that explicitly denounces the state of a ready product. It is impossible. In our culture, and we can probably blame this on an Indo-european linguistic particularity but that doesn’t matter, we only know things. Writing means to create things.

“I don’t create things. That is because I am not after redemption. I don’t want a product to represent my will to power and redeem me, give me honor or recognition or any other product of the sordid edifice mentioned above. These lines should sound strange and wrong to both your ears, reader, how else could they contain any – truth.

“This is it. The scarce waking hours saved from the self-mutilation of our society through the instrument of my mind, I fill them with reflections. That should be my small Ought. I am talking to your dreams, not to your illusions. Do you see yourself?