Rare Insanity Causes Freedom!

“Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844 - 1900)

War is the ultimate threat to individualism and freedom. In war, you are killed not for who you are, but rather for what you represent. There is nothing about war that secures the rights of individuals to do or say anything, because in war, there are no individuals. Whether you are sending the bullet or receiving it, you don’t count as you, only what you are perceived by a complete stranger as being to him. I cannot think of being held in less regard for my individual self in any situation than would occur in the mass chaos of war. That you are a father, a child, a musician, or a priest is nothing. A loving mother is no more than a statistic, and her dead or dying child merely a foot note in the annals of wartime atrocity. The man who threw the grenade receives honors, and the dead aren’t even allowed to tell him their names.

War is the psychotic mass-mobilization of nameless and faceless war-drones converging to a point from all directions, trained and commanded to murder, kill, and destroy the other nameless, faceless war-drones that oppose them. Each soldier has to wipe clean from his mind that this ‘enemy’ is a human being: fraught with fears, hopes, denials, and a biological drive to survive and sometimes, just like you and I, by any means necessary. After all, they have a ‘job’ to do and this ‘job’ takes precedent over your life. As they say, “Nothing personal. It’s just business.” It seems the soldier has to also forget that he, too, is an individual, and while in uniform and under strict orders, must shake off any pangs of conscience he or she might feel toward those they were told were their enemies.

So this is what it comes down to, eh? War is just another job? It is no small coincidence then that in wartime, civil liberties and individualism are seen as dangerous to a society. For war to be successful, the I, the me, and the you, must be purged from our memory banks, for the slightest bit of conscience would destroy all endeavor to destroy the endeavors of others seeking to destroy our own. The cycle continues unabated.

Peace is only thing a true individualist can abide. Individualism is not about being free to make any amount money you desire, or to behave in any way you wish regardless of consequence to others. Real individualism is freedom from being forgotten and disregarded by the masses in their hysteria over one sort of threat or another. Individualism is the personal touch of society and government. It demands limits on that overwhelming force or the masses, regarding your being as “endowed with inalienable rights” and privileges that accompany your natural existence, no matter how your individual tastes may differ from any margin, large or small, of the majority.

Individualism becomes defined by the civil liberties we enact to protect our selfhood. Civil rights are the boundaries placed on overwhelming ‘impersonal business’ practice, and those guaranteed liberties permit us to continue as individuals and matter in our personal being. I don’t care what the rest of the nation craves or abhors, I still matter. And so do you.

Next time someone tells you that war is about ‘freedom’ or ‘preserving rights’, call him or her out as the soul-less sacks of shit they really are. There are very few wars in history that were fought for noble causes and, in each of those, the men who went to war did so with the greatest caution and deliberation. It is no small thing to take another man’s life from him. In society, the individual who willfully kills another individual is treated as a pariah and imprisoned. If that same killer were to be wearing a uniform and marching under a flag, his murdering becomes miraculously transformed into an act of heroism and personal self-sacrifice. The only thing, sacrificed, however, was the conscience of the nation that ordered this man to set aside his own humanity.

Can you imagine a world where all soldiers refuse to fight? Such blissful and rare insanity! Such wonder!

“Irony is something that happens. Hypocrisy is something produced. Insanity is usually the result.” (SL Aronovitz, 1960 – not quite dead yet, but working on it)