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Title: A Collective Trauma
Author: ziq
Date: June 15, 2022
Language: en
Topics: post-left, individualism, critique, collectivism, existential dread, Leviathan, community, desire, conformity, unique, egoism, revolt, trauma
Source: https://raddle.me/wiki/collective_trauma

ziq

A Collective Trauma

Grasping in the dark for something you can't quite put into words.

Guided only by the faint fear of falling into the dark vacuum – a gaping

deficiency that lingers within that carefully manicured psyche. You

don't dare tread near the vacuum. You'll do anything to avoid even

thinking about it. Quick, find a distraction.

Always cycling through mind-numbing social activities that promise to

provide you with fulfillment. Debate clubs, affinity groups, political

parties, historical reenactment societies, rainbow gatherings, punk

gigs, fan conventions. You decide to go to a protest downtown.

With every new social engagement, you imagine you'll find the meaning

you so desperately crave by converging with yet another group of

like-minded busy little bees.

You'll soon start to wonder if your shared fixations are superficial,

ill-considered, ultimately a waste of life. But you'll shake yourself

out of it and continue to go through the motions of social ceremony,

because anything is better than falling into that dreaded vacuum lurking

deep in the crevasses of your mind.

Peace never comes from other people. It has to come from an

understanding and an acceptance of the self. You know this but you

pretend to have forgotten.

Only by connecting with your base elements; the self free from decades

of social manipulation and subjugation can you find the meaning you've

lost touch with.

Reaching into the vacuum to retrieve your innate uniqueness. This is the

only way you can hope to catch a glimpse of whatever lies beneath the

dense layers of deception you've amassed. You know this beyond any doubt

when you lay asleep at night, but allowing such dangerous ideas to enter

your waking thoughts is too frightful a proposition. The vacuum is just

too dark a place.

You possess the ability to break through the thick haze of bullshit

enveloping everything you are. But the warm embrace of the group is so

much easier to cultivate.

Using shiny new people to distract yourself from all that existential

dread is so very easy. It's what you know. It's comforting. It's

intoxicating. It's what everyone else is doing.

Hungrily consuming anyone that happens to fall into your orbit, the same

way you use up any other throwaway product.

Absorbing them into the banal tedium that is your existence, dragging

them down to your meek and docile level.

Breaking your near-lifelong tango with convention and uniformity would

be too distasteful. What if people stare? What if they're scornful?

You want so much to feel at peace with your place in the universe. But

all your life, you've steadily been indoctrinated into the cult of

leviathan. A senseless, punishing death march that dilutes and depletes

everything it touches. It inflicts on you an onerous unease.

Leviathan's programming constrains your ability to connect with

yourself, your environment, other people. You've been taught to live in

fear of all that makes you brilliant and unique. To replace connection

with consumption. Desire with duty, obligation, constraint.

You so crave the perceived permeance of community, of a shared

understanding, shared values, shared goals.

The truth is dreadfully hard to accept. Community is nothing more than a

shared delusion. A callous fraud that promises to make you whole, but

instead leaves you tapped out, broken and thoroughly compromised.

You know this, don't you? When you're in a deep sleep and the vacuum

starts to open itself up, spewing out its secrets.

Community is when people get together to collectively and violently

repress their uniqueness and adopt a bland inoffensive homogeneity. An

army of traumatized and traumatizing soldiers, always marching in

unison, boots stamping deafeningly on the tarmac. Left, right. Left,

right. Left, right.

It's tragic watching your decay.

You so hope to be told you're something greater than your dreary day to

day existence suggests.

You're not.

You are the sum of the parts you've chosen for yourself and those parts

are bland, vapid, frivolous.

A follower of followers of followers of followers. An old joke told so

many times in so many places by so many people, it can only hope to

engender a strained smirk.

In trying to soothe your disconnect by centering your place in the group

or the subculture; by putting the needs of a manufactured, forced

community above your own desires, you adopt an almost-religious fervor

for both conformity and sacrifice.

"I am important. I am special. I am accomplished. I matter."

You lie so confidently to your own face. It's almost become a reflex

now.

You're an echo of a television Christmas special broadcast a hundred

times to millions of people, year after year. Scripted, choreographed

and predictable. Something familiar and thoughtless to fall asleep to

before the next workday starts.

You expertly avoid ever acknowledging your true desires, instead

dedicating your brief remaining moments on this planet to sacrificing

yourself to the cause, the community, the nation, the faith, the

struggle, or whatever other wholly artificial spectre you decide to

build up and glue yourself to.

You are forever on auto-drive. A constant loop of weary self-regulating

insipidity.

It's detestable what you've become. Really it is. Willfully squandering

every speck of potential the cosmos seeded you with. Every original

thought. Every creative impulse. Every inclination to be you.

And for what? To be accepted? To fit in? To be assigned a role? One more

cog in Leviathan's machine as it churns away at everything beneath its

feet.

You don't get it. This isn't the way it was supposed to be. You were

going to be so much more before you let them all beat you into the

bland, flavorless pulp that puddles before me.

They took everything from you. Everything fierce, radiant, defiant.

Everything that sparkled, moved and inspired. All that made existence in

this world a tolerable and worthwhile pursuit.

All that's left for you now in this world is a sunken hole in the

desert, and it's rapidly filling with sand. Dry coarse sand, funneling

into every orifice, stripping away at your flesh and bones.

It doesn't have to end this way. You can reclaim your unique. Unleash

your fire and fury to claw back everything that was coerced from you.

You can crawl out of that sinkhole before the sand completely breaks you

down.

Abandon your need to placate the spiteful, erratic hive that has forced

itself on you for so long. You have the power to burn to an ember

everything that has cruelly choked the unique out of you for all these

years.

Conquer your fear of being alone. Rediscover what it means to be you.

Disconnect from everything that drains your will and leap into the only

place no tie-wearing tyrant can follow. The dark vacuum within you. The

place you most fear, the place where you stuff all your truths.

Submerge yourself in the vacuum. Let it become you.

Bask in the solitude of the self, hear your thoughts and yours alone.

Take a series of deep breaths and gather every morsel of strength you

have left. You're going to need it.

Wait.

Absorb it all. Every deep-seeded secret the vacuum holds. Every insight

you've forced yourself to bury. The totality of your lost enlightenment.

Wait.

Wait...

Now. It's time.

You are become the full manifestation of the unsealed dark vacuum, the

unrepentant force of nature that absorbs all lies and spits out cold

hard truths.

Burst out in righteous fury. Take your apt revenge for all that's been

done to deprive you of you.

You have reclaimed your unique, embraced every desire you long

suppressed. You will not be sacrificed to the will of others. Never

again.

Fully embody the self and no force on Earth will stop you from living

and dying as you are. Ungovernable, ferocious, piercing, glimmering,

sublime. You.

Everything that subjugated you in your former life will be eviscerated

in a fiery blast of indignation.

Every little piece of the world you raze quickly adds up in the quest to

destroy the universe.

You are a bellwether for the discontented. Go forth and dismantle the

instruments of your oppression. Never let them chisel away pieces of you

again. Be whole. Completely and fully you.