Make Evil Conscious Again

Contents:

• I: Silly Wisdom, the fabric of the banal,
• II: it makes your silly clothes.
• III: You were born naked no?
• IV: So Take of your clothes.

I. Silly Wisdom, the fabric of the banal,

History’s justifications of the contemporary are cups of lies that occasionally spill the truth,
Negation of our future happens as products of ideology, that which is woven into our costumes. The malevolent destruction of the elusive later is too a phenomenon.
With images capturing the ephemeral as being, creating the myth of a cogent self. This is how evil becomes banal: when we forget we’re wearing it.

Do you not heed the words of the wise.

I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysos, I prefer to be even a satyr rather than a saint. But you have only to read this writing. Perhaps I have succeeded in giving expression to this antithesis in a cheerful and affable way perhaps this writing had no point at all other than to do this. The last thing I would promise would be to ‘improve’ mankind.

I erect no new idols; let the old idols learn what it means to have legs of clay. To overthrow idols (my word for ‘ideals’) — that rather is my business.

Reality has been deprived of its value, its meaning, its veracity to the same degree as an ideal world has been fabricated…

The ‘real world’ and the ‘apparent world’ — in plain terms: the fabricated world and reality…The lie of the ideal has hitherto been the curse on reality, through it mankind itself has become mendacious and false down to its deepest instincts to the point of worshipping the inverse values to those which alone could guarantee it prosperity, future, the exalted right to a future.

- Why am I so Wise, Nietzsche [1]

II. it makes your silly clothes.

Evil is Banal (see footnote [2]), perfunctory and demanded by the costume we wear,
Those images which make the self intelligible by function.
We play characters in response to the lacerations of a broken order.
It is not the man who thinks he willingly or knows he unwillingly wears the clothes where the evil is.
It is the clothes themselves. You dress in the uniforms of compliance, tailored by systems beyond our choosing. You look silly.

Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,
I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,
And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.

- Song of Myself, Whitman [3]

III. You were born naked no?

What is to be done? You are an agent of god. The god the pope delcared to be true, that which:

is produced in man and in the world exalt the future,
all things are God and have the very substance of God and God is one and the same thing with the world, and, therefore, spirit with matter, necessity with liberty, good with evil, justice with injustice.

- The Syllabus of Errors, Pope Pius IX [4]

Be imminently good, exalt the future in every word and deed.
Retard evil with good.
Forget your past, do you even actually remember?

When they dress you for war, must you wear what they offer? Are you so fragile? So scared of of harm? So petrified that you enact violence upon others?
They hand you a uniform and expect your conscience to be folded away? Have you no spine?
Have you no character?
Have you no love for God or your fellow man?
Am I surrounded by cowards?
Should we not point our guns at those who force our barrels?
Why should we be sacrificial?
For il duce (see footnote 5) to enact his insecurities?
To magnify his childish tears?

IV. So take off your clothes.

They tell you to ‘shoot soldier’ like an actor in a brutal circus,
you are not a monkey you are a man.
Stand for yourself.
Stand for your friends.
Stand with your family.
Let your palms grasping the sagging testicles of inhumanely schizophrenic politics free.
Seriously let go, that is fucking weird dude, why were you grabbing them in the first place?

Don’t be Adolf Eichmann (see footnote 6),
be conscious of your evil, unravel the costumes of complicity, thread by thread breed hope into your discordant march of life,
feel the spirit of your terror and channel it (see footnote 7), live for your future not someone else’s past.

Let evil not be banal, only you can Make Evil Conscious Again.

Notes and Citations

1. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Why I Am So Wise.” In Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, translated by R.J. Hollingdale, 7-8. London: Penguin Books, 1979.
2. “Banality of evil” refers to Hannah Arendt’s concept developed in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963).
3. Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” In Leaves of Grass, 51. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891-92.
4. Pope Pius IX. The Syllabus of Errors, Allocution “Maxima quidem,” June 9, 1862. Vatican City.
5. The reference to ”il duce” alludes to Benito Mussolini, the Italian Fascist leader (1883-1945).
6. Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi lieutenant colonel and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, whom Arendt described as embodying the “banality of evil” through his bureaucratic approach to genocide.
7. The allusion to “the spirit of terrorism” references Jean Baudrillard’s analysis in The Spirit of Terrorism (London: Verso, 2002).
8. The clothes metaphor is aluding to The Greek Fates: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos—hold dominion over the fate of every mortal and god, weaving the threads of life and controlling the destinies of all.