Fuck Power

A Hegelian Response to the Arbitrariness of Authority

Desire Contra Society

This is not a call for power to justify itself, it simply a guide to get your mind un-captured by the mindfuck of people with power over you.

I have a dream of good power (which is not what this article is about!). This is a dream of power which can only be achieved by taking into account its radical opposite; which is to say, understanding why at any given moment, an Absolute opposition to your extremely-just-and-good use of power is logical. This is the sort of power that I find is best.

This is not— typically how power works, nor is it how power typically thinks. Power is often held by people who have long forgotten the ethical-social-techno reasons they have power except when they have to instrumentally justify themselves. They have friends who also have power, they have relations with people who are also disinclined to think of the disenfranchised and powerless. Power doesn’t REALLY need to justify itself.

But like I said, this is not a call for power to justify itself, simply a guide to get your mind un-ensnared by the mindfuck of people with power over you.

Maybe you’re a real goody goody, maybe you’re very unlike me, maybe you’re a baddy baddy, and that’s why you’re unlike me, but if you’re like me, you’ve been against authority that is totally justified. Have you ever been in school and not wanted to listen to the teacher? Was it because teaching itself is wrong? No, it was because you simply had no desire to listen. Who else is going to advocate for that desire, but you? Now you are alone, alienated, isolated.

You think you deserve to be isolated.

Remember that part of 1984— or was it Brave New World— where the main guy asked if maybe there was something outside of this conditioning which was worth noticing? There definitely is— and that was definitely Brave New World. You are conditioned to be a Kantian, or a classical Hegelian, in a sense. A universalist, or a state actor, either way, an ethical and rational body working against yourself. You are of two bodies. So let us discard of the body which works against your body. Now what is left? We have gotten rid of Big Brother, are you to slip into psychosis? Hedonism? What is next?

Maybe you should listen to the teacher, but ultimately, I can see why you wouldn’t want to, and you definitely don’t HAVE to. I MIGHT listen to the teacher but MAYBE it is because I am too CHICKENSHIT to drop out of school. I applaud you, spaced out drop out. But what is next?

Desire’s Society

Justified power is the light, we are talking about wielding the darkness here. Individual desire over societal plugging in. How does individual desire create society?

In Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, individuals create families. Families create communities. Communites create the state. Each small pact links with other small pacts and creates a rational actor, an ethical actor. But maybe you remember the first part of this where we are freeing your brain from such bullshit snares which capture you in a large rational body and make you work against yourself.

So what is the alternative?

You can create a society based off of your desire. Which is to say, what you value universally/ethically, interpersonally, and immediately/intuitively. Your relationships, your friendships, and your pacts do not have to be made through another’s egoism. Rather, it should be made through your own egoism. Your own pacts, your own values, your own wishes for your life.

These pacts-of-desire can guide you through society, and lead to a positive freedom which can not be achieved by individual universalism.

A community of desire. A Union of Egoists. These are abstractions, what it really means is that you don’t have to submit to anyone or anything that you have not fully agreed to. You are not compelled by right, as described by Hegel, to be a member of a society. But you can compel yourself to be compelled by morals, morals which you find important, values which are intuitive to you, important, rather than empty, dulling, depressing, and simply, the egoism of someone else.

A romantic relationship is an interesting thing, you choose to let the desire of the other impact you. But you get to choose who gets to do this thing. From the romantic we can build an entire society of people Absolutely free from power, with the ability to say fuck all power, all authority which has ensnared us and we are tired of, authority is alien to itself, which is to say, alien to us who are in it, part of its machinery.

Simply: fuck power, but all power to the people. All power to every person over themselves.