Chương 2: Rebirth
I love the concept of trajectory, to know the position of something, its speed and direction and then to be able to predict its future, what could be more magical in this world? We can apply it to a cup of milk about to be spilled and ready ourselves to cry, we can use it for an asteroid about to extinguish life on earth, and watch as our doom looms over us, too weak to change our fate.
But I also hate it, because if you have a trajectory you may find peaks and dips, points of maximums and minimums as you do in calculus and I assure you things will get nasty real quick for many. Because all these things are relative and it's only in hindsight or with the derivative that you can truly know that, and many times it's difficult to do both.
Let's say we were someone going through the different stages of life, I wouldn't use the Eriksonian system because my failures would pile up quickly due to my childhood and I still haven't seen much of adulthood so I'm not willing to accept such a negative review.
We will be using a looser system based on the achievement of a generic maturity depending on achievement so that I can flex a bit.
If you were to ask my Past Self of a year ago where would I position the peak of my life, he would answer after a bit of hesitation, our first year of high school. I had the highest grades ever in one of the most difficult high schools of Turin, I still remember how proud my father and mother were, even my sister which I often fought with, acknowledged me. When we visited Egypt back then, my father's chin had risen beyond the stratosphere as he seemed to look down upon all his relatives.
Yeah, I know that if you peak in high school you are basically trash, but I don't have much material on hand and boy, I have been such a socially undesirable person for so long that it's not that surprising. I am the guy that after middle school you see again never and that people shouldn't have invited into anything for all kinds of reasons ranging from lameness to ugliness and the fact that in public I gave the vibe of not giving two shits about the entirety of existence before stewing in self regret and envy for losing the opportunity to make true friends.
Now it's different, with a beard I look like I may actually blow myself up. Before the crippling depression would have made me consider cheaper and less flamboyant ways of returning to dust and people actually think that they can outrun a fat terrorist. How naive.
Yeah, now that I got that off the chest, let's turn back to our talk about Life Trajectory.
Now, the hesitation I talked about before would disappear at school as I would like to show off my grade and how much I was valuable in a competitive environment like school, especially mine. (I was a boy of many masks, still don't know how many).
The hesitation comes from an extremely exciting parenthesis of my dull life which I still smile unconsciously upon remembering. I had been in my second year of high school, 15-year-old boy in full puberty seriously attempting to lose weight and get fit for the 10th time in his life, I was in a better shape than most of the time and the day before I had seen the mirage of some abs under the curtain of fat which hadn't been lifted for ten years, you can imagine my rage in not seeing the desired results in less than a week, it reached Asura levels after two.
To understand how all of this went down, you first need to know how deeply enchanted I had been with Dictators and other men of power across history, it bordered morbose worship and I fantasized about being a human of such a great stature in the eyes of others, I was deeply attracted to power maybe because I thoroughly lacked it in the context of a rare authoritative Pater Familias figure in the contemporary age but which is pretty normal when you are living in a Muslim family.
So, Alexander Magnus, Julius Ceasar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Mussolini(remember that I live in Italy), Hitler, my interest in great men had gradually become a desire to understand the ways and conditions through which they gained power.
It was like this, that I began studying history but only later on would one of my Future Selves understand, in a moment of enlightenment, that I was just seeking an answer to one of the three fundamental questions.
Why are we doing something rather than nothing? Seriously has anyone tried to understand why? Is it just merely for survival's sake and then for comfort that we built this enormous machine known as Civilization?
I wasn't convinced, so I sought an answer in the extremes, in those men who not only did something but did it in a way that later on people would cry beneath their statues for having achieved less than them at their age(Alexander Magnus), later on people would use his name as a way to call themselves the Supreme Leader/Emperor of the World(Ceasar), Kaiser, Tzar.
I didn't find an answer with this approach, but I learnt a lot about people, the crowd psychology and the way to gain their favour through speech. The basic tools which a great Orator or Hitler need to master before facing the crowd. You are not speaking but giving voice to the innermost thoughts and feelings of the people before you, you need to read the crowd and act as their avatar.
You are unveiling their unconscious in what Heidegger would call disclosure or more properly Aletheia.
I did just that, it was the day after the Paris Bombing of 2015 I could almost feel the sadness and outrage on my skin as the emotional blow materialized the fear and unconscious forces that had been sleeping for years. The event had woken up Europe as a whole and even now I think of it as something which truly tested the so much celebrated European democracies and freedom.
Would this horrendous crime against humanity achieve its goal, and truly show that there is no difference between us and them, that violence is the only resort to deal with the violent?
No, we didn't bend. But as an Italian of Muslim upbringing, I could still perceive the danger that we could face if this pressure was applied any more than this. My knowledge of history made me understand that we were near one of those turning points where the world could loop back on itself and would need the blood of millions of innocents to remember again that it needs to remember.
Everyone knows that the history books are not written on white paper, but blood red parchments which glow with the souls of billions to heal the blindness of forgetfulness. Is it a curse or a blessing?
That day the school had organized in its gyms a meeting for the students to talk and debate about the event and the issue, to raise our awareness and allow us to share our viewpoints. It was the first and only time that my high school organized such an event and looking back it strengthens my belief even more, at stake wasn't some empty talk but the issue of a united Europe and in which direction it would achieve this unity.
We can't forget that seventy years ago Europe was united but at what price? Under the violent Leadership of a barbaric evil which crushed any form of conflict(the dialogue between thesis and antithesis, This time it's Hegel man) and with it any form of freedom.
It was scheduled for three hours. Before that we all shared a minute of silence in remembrance and compassion, with the latter meaning literally cum+patior, suffering with you in Latin. I didn't have the arrogance to say that it could be possible to suffer with someone else, suffering, pain is one of the most personal and deeper emotions we can feel and one of the primordial drives we as a species share with all the animal kingdom. To feel pain is to feel how close death is, how far away survival and safety are, and pain is the greatest call for change.
Pain only gives us the possibility to choose the direction of the change, both ends are met with relief only one is permanent and that is Death, the most authentic possibility and form of Existence(Heidegger again).
I listened for most of the first hour, or maybe it would be better to say that I read. I was reading the crowd. Yes, I was looking for the red flags which I had learned about in my studies of those great men, fear, uncertainty, weakness, fragility, they were the background, the canvas upon which Alexander, Ceasar, and Napoleon would stand out as they cast their shadows and exposed their shared condition and the reasons and causes of their chaos and gradually united their broken wills into one whole through the skillful use of language. As such a line would form behind the backs of these great men, the disjointed crowd of individuals would then become a column of faithful followers, their shadows would then superimpose over that of their leaders, strengthening their authority)
They didn't speak, Language spoke through them (Sprache spricht, yeah I love Heidegger) because language is what connects people and allows them to transcend their individuality into the broader sea of collectivity.
That was my job, this crowd of wandering thoughts, I had to hammer into unity(Yeats this time).
And they cheered with every answer I gave them, I wasn't speaking common sense but their sense of it. This is what allowed Mussolini to do what he did, the same goes for Hitler.
For the first time of my life, I felt the joy of power. I felt part of them, and they were a part of me! I felt whole... With my authority, I could influence them, make them see what I saw, believe what I believed, and in the end, think what I thought.
I understood what God was at an unconscious level, the projection of human will(read Feuerbach for further insights), what the species is to the individual, the bridge cast over the ontological difference between Will and Power and which later on Nietzsche would fuse in his famous Will to Power. Nothing hindered me for a moment.
And then I was hindered by myself, it wouldn't be the last time it happened. I felt how small I was compared to that greatness and realized how dangerous that belief had been, would I have ended up becoming simply a puppet in the hand of the crowd in the end? And who was that small little homunculus I managed to perceive as myself?
Only now I know that back then I had experienced an extreme form of deindividualization, something which happens daily in our social life.
Have you ever noticed how you behave differently with different groups of friends(that is if you are lucky or unlucky enough to have that many)? That is deindividualization.
This event is what I call the peak of my political Ambition aka dictatorial fantasies, it's the maturity of my Dao as a Seeker of Power and as all kinds of maturity is followed by decay and the realization of how weak and unworthy I was of such fantasies, this was followed by a relatively short bout of depression lasting only four months before I attempted seeking another Way again.
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