On Success In Futile Endeavours

On Freedom, the paradox of action amidst futility, and my personal framework for navigating the current mindscape.

Context №1: The Personal Glossary

There's a particular non-exhaustive set of words whose meanings I used to take for granted, as if they didn't really mean anything, didn't carry any weight, and were, akin to many other words, just words.

Here it is:

freedom (n.) — ...

right (n.) — ...

privilege (n.) — ...

responsibility (n.) — ...

duty (n.) — ...

guilt (n.) — ...

shame (n.) — ...

These are complex concepts and feelings, often politically, legally, philosophically, or even metaphysically charged. That's why I'm not defining them. I'm not a huyev¹ dictionary, am I? What's important is not how they are defined and the precision and universality of their definitions or how I say it to you, but what it represents in your head, what shape it assumes there when you see it. For now, I'm going to give an abstract example of them in the personal context that's been painfully important for me.

My favourite definition of freedom is a recursive "a state or a feeling of not being unfree." You can only understand what freedom is when you understand what is its opposite for you, whatever makes you feel oppressed, chained, or caged, or whatever creates discomforting claustrophobia of the spirit. Some freedoms, nay many, exist only when they've been earned through violent struggle first, ranging from political and civil liberties we have, to a more cosmic "birth event", after which a subject suddenly attains freedom to "exist" and has no choice but to do something with it.

Many societal, political, civil, etm. freedoms were dreams until relatively recent times and were taken from the opressor by force, fought for with blood, before a right to distribute and guarantee those freedoms was given to the Authority and thereby those freedoms became "legal rights" within that society, often still remaining a privilege compared to the rest of the world. Although I don't want to claim that freedom is a privilege—I would of course want to see it as a right from birth, the inner force, the Prometheus's fire, etm.—I can't. Putting idealism aside, in reality, it's a privilege, but not one given to you by the Authority (assuming power is also "given" to them as a privilege), but one given to you by your ancestors who fought for it, who protested, who died, who built their future, your past, your present. This privilege of freedom must be exercised, because if it's not, the Authority would devise that it's them who have given it to you and, because they are in control now, decide to take it back. It must be remembered and constantly reminded to the Authority that freedom of people is not a top-down gift but a bottom-up legacy. If you forget about either of those, take it for granted, restrain from manifesting it in any possible way, the Authority would think that their freedoms are not privileges but rights, a natural, more comforting way of thinking both for a human being and any entity comprised of human beings. It is our duty, ours, holders of that freedom, to pass the legacy to future generations and use it as a lever to shape that very future to come.

The above might come across as idealistic and naive to you, and I won't argue with that; moreover, I know it is naive, I want it to be naive. I'm fully aware of the limitations but I won't let them eat my enthusiasm alive, pluck the feathers, butcher the meat, and use the bones for stock. The universe is indifferent to our flattering and reality doesn't work like we want it to, but I believe it can if we all bully it enough. In short, fuck you Absurdity of Being, we cook.

We can transcend the definition of freedom to the level where it spreads to any degree of liberty, sovereignty, and independence, and includes any low or high-level incarnations of Freedom, the capital "F" Freedom that starts with freedom to think, to imagine, to will, to exist, etm. We can propagate it to any choice we can make, both conscious or unconscious, or the complete refusal to make one, that is when we decide to act by inaction or give up or wait until the next good chance to make a move. The patience as a tool, when you skip your move and wait, when you prepare and recuperate, should not be underestimated, for it is powerful in certain cases, but there are also enough cases when it's harmful. Strategic patience, or sometimes a hunter's patience, shouldn't be mistaken for forbearance, concession, avoidance, neglect, complete withdrawal from action, often led by confusion and nonchalance. Positive patience keeps you focused on the future solution and elicits hope, while other, more negative types of "patience", lead to helplessness in the face of destiny, to doomerism, to escapism.

The most serious problem looms when the exercise of Freedom feels futile and pointless, dirty and wasteful, confusing and disorienting, and a person decides to opt out of the game. The game, however, doesn't stop, and without enough vigilance, the person's inaction might be abused by other players, larger forces, who might have as well deliberately or not memed that feeling into the person's brain beforehand and now think that the person is being obedient and doesn't mind whatever they do and not in fact "defiantly and pompously ignoring them" as the person thinks. The inaction may seem meaningful but the other players would see it this way only when it directly harms them; in other cases, they would just take advantage of you and your inaction. By essence, it is a passive nihilism, a form of nihilism that's not actively chosen or pursued, but rather fallen into through inaction or disengagement. It implies a state of believing in the meaninglessness of action without necessarily embracing or celebrating that meaninglessness—such nihilism is seen not in the intention but only in the result.

A person chooses to cope until life magically improves, which might seem like a stoic and noble course of action but, because people are good at adapting to the most atrocious conditions imaginable. The copium replaces blood, becomes rooted in the mentality so deep that the withdrawal would be excruciating, ridden with shame, guilt, and inflated sense of responsibility for the past actions that would eat the person from the inside. Hence, not to feel those pains, it's easier to keep coping and wait, finding various excuses, contriving various theories of how world and its history works and how it is most definitely most certainly soon to change in your favour when the eternal cycle of history cycles again. Will it, though? Who are you, a divine statistician, eh?

The cure is to take off the copium mask and start microdosing hopium to forget for a second that things seem impossibly difficult, become a little bit tipsy on hope, drop the social and historical shackles and become freer without losing control and becoming delusional. The earned coping skill, instead of applied to holding the past on the shoulders and evading the present, should be transformed into endurance in exercising freedom, imagining the future, building the future in the face of adversity, even when it feels meaningless, especially when it does, for the larger forces don't sleep and crave for your next turn.

Intermission: A Power Nap

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, and an aquatint by Francisco Goya made in 1799.

(1) Francisco Goya created a painting called "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" (El sueño de la razón produce monstruos) in 1799 to the rampant political, social, and religious abuses of the time period. He captioned, saying that "Fantasy, when divorced from reason, produces only impossible monsters. But when united with reason, it becomes the mother of art and the wellspring of its desires." Thereby he calls for a balance between imagination (fantasy) and rationality (reason). Many scholars believe that the artist depicted himself surrounded by drawing tools. His mind is clouded by sleep, entangled with nightmarish menagerie. The owls surrounding the protagonist may be a symbol of foolishness, while the swarm of bats could be an embodiment of ignorance. Or something else—we don't know.

(2) Homer "endowed" his Odysseus with a curious and potentially fatal flaw: he falls asleep at the most inopportune moments. This pattern is more than mere plot device, it's a subtle yet significant character detail that repeatedly jeopardises Odysseus's journey home. Near Ithaca, exhausted from steering, Odysseus falls asleep, and his crew opens Aeolus's bag of winds, blowing the ships off course. When Odysseus and his men reach the island of Helios, Odysseus falls asleep after warning his crew not to harm the sacred cattle. What do they do? They slaughter the cattle. On the last stage of his journey home, Odysseus falls asleep as the Phaeacians transport him. They unload his sleeping form onto Ithaca's shores without waking him. That example, unlike two others, didn't have particular negative consequences, yet still demonstrated Odysseus's vulnerability.

(3) In the Epic of Gilgamesh, after Gilgamesh and Enkidu's journey to the Cedar Forest, Utnapishtim challenges Gilgamesh to stay awake for six days and seven nights as a test to prove he's worthy of immortality. The sleep test of this kind is a recurring motif in mythology, folklore, and literature of cultures from all around the world. It carries various symbolic significance, that ofttimes involves vigilance against temptation, dedication to a quest, a test of human limits and willpower, transcendence (e.g. from ordinary to heroic), and resistance to supernatural forces.

Context №2: Surviving the Chimeromachy

We're in the perpetual infinitesimal Now, the middle of the cosmic hourglass, sorting grains of sand seeped through us, hoping to see what's in the End, turning futures into the past, observed and guided by the countless Watchers, whether we want it or not. The Watchers rise and fall in constant battles for survival and dominance over each other. Each of them is a powerful egregore, a chimera created by us, a mélange of our various beliefs, ideas, and cultural elements. Each of them feeds on our energy and attention. Some Watchers feed on our resentment, anger, and hate, others on our compassion, empathy, love; some Watchers combine both, others are neutral. Yet, whoever of them is holding your hand while you sieve the sand decides what your future will look like.

The battle might look ugly and meaningless, the battle might seem futile. Often this is what some of the Watchers want and make us think. We can close our eyes, we can avert our gaze, we can pretend it's not happening and wait for it to self-resolve, we can lose ourselves in slumber, but the battle won't stop until all future is past. While we sleep, boiled alive, they overthrow their foes and gain power. Thus, in particular cases, we see how evil wins over good, malevolent wins over benevolent, dystopia wins over utopia—not completely, but in proportional sense. The opposite is also true; when the "evil" Watchers don't have support or their supporters are silent and stop believing in them, the evil Watchers shrink, shift away to the background, and hunterly wait in shadows until they can find their next servant to brainwash.

We're free to believe this memetic warfare doesn't exist at all or deny the existence of some of the Watchers we don't like, but they don't disappear when we close our eyes. Having opened them after a while, it's easy to find the emergent paradigm looking funny at you. Each Watcher presents its own "wager" and you must decide which Watcher to feed with your attention and energy, whether it is support or resistance or negligence. The stakes exist, the game is happening, and abstaining still counts as a move with consequences that often may come as a punishment.

Certain Watchers "punish" those who don't contribute to their manifestation and growth. Their smite can range from potential total annihilation of humanity to your personal discomfort. If you know a certain Watcher possesses threat or promises prosperity, the potential benefits of "believing in" outweigh the costs of non-engagement. The Watcher might not be able to punish directly and have no intention of doing so, yet you may feel punished by shame, guilt, or regret, when your own little realm that you have been protecting by ignoring the Watchers has no place in the common reality anymore. All you would be left with in that situation is to take the blue pill, live in the past and reject that present, "lost in a nostalgic trance, blankly stare into oblivious nothingness, oscillating within a kaleidoscope of memories, a mnemeidoscope of emotions, to and fro". Your grandchild would approach you and ask: "What were you doing when the world was collapsing?" You would answer: "Nothing, it would collapse anyway. The universe tends towards disorder. Things tend to fuck up on occasion, kid. There's nothing you can do."

There's a tension between individual choice and predetermined outcomes that is often misinterpreted. How much agency do you have while sieving the sand? The technological progress marches on, the global crises strike sooner or later, the systems collapse and rebuild themselves, the political movements fade and gain power, the life seems to revolve on its own, the grains of sand form the same conical pile at the bottom of the hourglass, yet it doesn't make it all predictable. The present determines the future but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future. Every small exercise of Freedom, whether it's social, political, or personal, or any other, may result in an unpredictable cascade of changes, both positive and negative. It may not be enough to prevent the upheaval, it may not be enough to stop the battle and defeat the egregores, to mould the future into a desirable shape, to create ripples in the space of history, to change the shared reality, yet it can maintain a spirit of life within you, within your little part of that reality. You are not doing it for someone, you're not doing it to "save the world", you're certainly not doing it to "fit in", to earn approval; you're always doing it only for yourself, to not let the fire extinguish, to keep your spirit strong, your spine straight, and your eyes on the future to come. If an action, however small it may seem or really be, allows you to raise your voice, manifest who you are and want to be, or it's simply feels a right thing to do, it's enough of a reason to do it and the Absurdity of Being (one of the Watchers, perhaps) can go fuck itself again.

Some people worship death instead of life and spend a solid chunk of their existence expecting something to die, meanwhile trying to explain why it will inevitably happen, instead of applying those efforts to maintain life. Such people spend more time in the past, poking the old wounds, either personal or societal, consumed by doing time an autopsy, instead of imagining a better future, working towards it, or at least being present. Such people work on dissection and deconstruction and do not even think of reconstruction. Scuh people think all things die and rise again, hence they can give up and let reality roll on its own accord. All because those who worship death outwardly are inwardly dead themselves. They need their own passively nihilistic attitude to life, to Freedom, the reality of their own little copium den to fully match the shared reality so they don't live in a dissonance. There's no fire in them, there's no Light, no Life, and thus they serve the Watchers who feed on such an attitude, on such emotions, on the lack of aspiration, and thereby only gain strength, pulling more and more people into the same spiralling vortex. Why would you feed such an egregore? Why would you promote such an attitude among others? Why would you turn yourself into a doomerism propaganda machine?

Another question that looms unanswered, what if you want to do something but nothing can be done at all? Not in a sense of futility of it but mere opportunity or ability? Or what to do if the exercise of Freedom would only hurt you back? What if engagement is dangerous? What if some of the Watchers would devour you as soon as you engage? What if you just want to survive? Martyrdom is there only for few. The martyr's voice is loud, yet the dead martyr's voice doesn't sound at all. It's a noble path but we can't expect everyone to be ready to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. So what can we do?

We can become sleeping agents of hope, beacons that maintain Life and Light and worship it, ready to act when there's a chance. The agent doesn't let the reason sleep, the agent knows their mission. The agent takes care of themselves and of those around them. The agent doesn't let the Watchers worshiping death take over their mind and undermine the mission. If no other freedom can be exercised, the agent exercises the freedom to exist and doesn't let the fire extinguish. The agent doesn't give in when the Watchers try to persuade them to put the hands down and stop sieving the sand.

In a dimly lit room where candles cautiously melt, a long table laden with delicacies stretches out, and family and friends sit along its sides. The agent rises, adjusts their attire, and lifts a glass, and with a smile directed at the Absurdity of Being seated across the table, the agent proposes a toast:

—To success in our futile endeavour!

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This story was written for the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) Symposium. The STSC is a small, exclusive online speakeasy where a dauntless band of raconteurs, writers, artists, philosophers, flaneurs, musicians, idlers, and bohemians share ideas and companionship. Each month STSC members create something around a set theme. This cycle, the theme was “Chimera.”

1. an adjective derived from "huy" (хуй), which means "penis" or "dick" in English. Thereby "huyev" (хуев) is roughly equivalent to "fucking" in English when used as an intensifier or general expletive. This word is part of a family of Russian profanities known as "mat," which are considered quite strong and offensive, yet still used commonly. (I just felt like I have to start teaching you some Russian swear words.)