The Right To Be Greedy: Theses On The Practical Necessity Of Demanding Everything by For Ourselves & For Ourselves

Author:For Ourselves & For Ourselves
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: communist, egoist
Published: 1974-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

117

We are on the verge of liberation only when it can be said of each of us that he/she has become so rebellious, so irrepressible, and so unruly that she/he cannot be mastered by anything less than his/her self (i.e., among other things, when no mere projection or reification of a part of ourselves will suffice, any longer, or will be able successfully to rule over us.).

118

The “game” a1 is a form of armour, ideology is a “game”, character-armour is compulsive role-playing, the “script” is the self-image projected through time, the temporalized self-spectacle. In the white heat of the act of their comprehension as lived experience and as interpersonal praxis going on all around us, these names, and the concepts they name game, armour, ideology, role, character, script melt into one.

The self-spectacle, the spectacular self — self-representation — will be found necessary, a necessary use-value, a necessary interpersonal tool, in fact, a “survival kit”, and thus be reproduced, so long as (1) the dissonance of egoisms, the totality of conditions known in general as “poverty”, “scarcity”, prevails, and consequently, (2) people cannot get what they want often enough by being transparent with one another, by simply asking for it, and, (3) they cannot or will not take the risk of asking, the gamble of transparency, either for fear of the pain of refusal or out of the desperation of their need, and would therefore prefer to extract what they can by circuitous means, by subterfuge and deception, decoy and trickery — in short, by intransparent means.

The spectacular presentation of self in everyday life, the personal organization of false appearances (persona) — partly compulsive and involuntary, as especially in muscle armour — the little lie — these are the means of the devious route to the realization of desire. In their conscious part, they will be resorted to so long as the more direct means, transparency, does not work any better. In their more unconscious, compulsive part, they are the mark of repression and domination, the cowering wince of the whipped cur, frozen into a posture.

Character-armour is indeed the form of peoples’ complicity in the spectacle. Not that feeling guilty about one’s character-armour will do anything but exacerbate this problem.

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