DEPARTURE
No other creature takes as long to reach maturity as the human being. Within hours of being born, a lanky limbed horse can begin to run. Within weeks of hatching from an egg, a flustered and frightened bird can fly away from the nest. Within decades of being born, humans can muster up enough independence to move out of their parents’ care. As a consequence of our brain’s inability to develop fast enough in the womb, we require years of careful and calculated development before we reach the age of maturity. Yet this does not imply maturity itself. Maturity, to some degree, is culturally sanctioned. Westernised culture, as we are seeing, takes the longest to mature – if at all – and as a result, our culture spends most of its time in a collective dependency.
This is not to say that there haven’t been attempts for independence in the past. Revolutions throughout history have shown that when a population is pushed to its limit it has no other choice but to reclaim its power. Over the last decade we have seen the tension mounting in our culture, to the degree that it is now politically correct to oppose certain political institutions. We are all very familiar with government’s incompetence in dealing with issues on climate change, sexism, racism and various other injustices and inequalities. Yet, at the same time, the population is now more compliant than ever. How has this happened?
Firstly, we became scared. We were completely caught off guard by an invisible enemy as the world shut down around us. Uncertainty and doubt have plagued every thought and action. Now we are driven by fear, a fear that must constantly be reinforced by the very government who has sworn to uphold our health and safety. They have claimed the ball to be in their court, and, now more than ever, we must turn to them like well-behaved dogs. Many of us know they aren’t as benevolent as they claim, which only perpetuates more fear and uncertainty, and fear is the greatest hindrance to taking action.
Secondly, infantilism is constantly reinforced within Western culture. Our mentality hardly leaves high school: we idolise the imagery of youthfulness; the popularity contest of social media; and the constant pursuit of mindless entertainment. We also have no rites of passage in our culture, and therefore no means of true maturation. To be fair, there are checkpoints of potential maturity such as graduation, moving out of home, the pursuit of career or family. Yet, by design, the whole process perpetuates a carrot-on-a-stick mentality. The end goal rarely comes, and whenever it does, the next carrot is already dangled before us. By its very nature, the culture is set up to find success, gratification, progress and happiness elsewhere, nullifying any sense of introspection or personal responsibility whatsoever.
Furthermore, through the democratic process, we hand all of our power and responsibility over to elected (and often unelected) officials. We let people – so removed from the everyday struggles of those they represent – guide us towards their visions of society. Then we complain about it. So then we tick a box every few years and pat ourselves on the back for our participation, still knowing that those we vote for are unlikely to deliver their promises. And then we complain about it again! Blame – momentary participation – blame again. This is how our society functions. And yet we remain baffled as to why things are so chaotic.
Now we find ourselves more entangled in this web than ever before. Under the guise of public health and safety, our individual health has become the government’s concern, and anything exercised under this guise is passively permitted. Through fear we willingly handed what responsibility we had left over to them, and replaced it with collectivism. Instead of our individual health being our own responsibility – as it had always been in the past – now it is society’s problem, for we’re told that we’re all in this together. But “The welfare of humanity,” as Camus wrote correctly “is always the alibi of tyrants.” Time and time again we have learnt that such authority is always abused. Always. Control is not care. It is rooted in the fear of letting go, the lack of trust and of love in another. With such a track record in incompetence, injustice and self-interest, it is hard to imagine government letting go of this newly claimed power easily. Voting one party over another achieves very little. The problem is not the party; it is the power source itself. Until that power source can be put back in its place and harnessed appropriately, voting is only rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
For many of us, this urgency for independence never enters our minds. Of course, as products of an irresponsible culture we are simply too accustomed to having our decisions transferred hierarchically. Therefore personal responsibility has become taboo. We once praised humanity for freeing itself through science, economics and technology. Furthermore, this same liberation of consciousness is what separates us from every other animal in the first place. Now we have accepted independence as intolerable. What a pity, to have evolved as free and independent human beings only to have this very essence reduced back to the barnyard.
But this reduction is only politically imposed. No matter how much the population is disempowered and dehumanised, responsibility is hardwired into the psyche. Consciousness itself implies responsibility, for it is rooted in self-awareness. It is for this reason that we have such an abundance of hero-myths throughout history. It is why we also have an abundance of sports. We idolise our heroes as symbols of hope and triumph because we see the same capacity within ourselves. They are testaments to our human potential.
No hero is made in the acceptance of the status quo. The status quo, and those who govern it, is what keeps humanity locked in the past, and the hero shatters this paradigm giving way to rebirth and regeneration. Such action is a choice up to a certain point. But as the world continues caving, responsibility kicks in like adrenaline. When there is nobody else to fix the problem, the hero has no choice but to stand in their power to transcend the evil that engulfs them.
Thankfully, in government’s attempt to centralise its power, this retrieval of humanity is now a global issue. Already we are seeing uprisings in pockets of the world. But the few shall become the many. At present, most of us are still confused as to why people are uprising. This confusion will be filtered out as the tyranny becomes more apparent over time. In one way or another, everyone will reach their boiling point. Of course, there will be resistance against this. Power is never handed over willingly. But this is how women claimed their right to vote. It is how the slaves were freed. It is how nations across the world won their independence. Change simply does not come without struggle.
It is important to stress that this act must not be violent. It cannot be driven by fear. The dilemma we find ourselves in is a product of fear, and therefore will only fuel it more. It must be done out of love and respect. We can respect what lies behind the façade of the most insane tyrant – a scared and alienated soul – because it is the result of the same neglect and trauma that so many of us are dealt in life. If we cannot see ourselves in the face of the oppressor, we neglect to face our own dark potential, and therefore we only inflict it back. It cannot be combated with more of the same. It can only be led by example, for a peaceful and positive outcome requires peaceful and positive participants to bring it forth.
This is not as daunting as one thinks. It is the majority who ultimately perpetuate the game, not the powerful. Like the end of V for Vendetta, once the population lost faith in their chancellor John Sutton, they walked away from their televisions, broke their curfew and marched through the streets as his outnumbered army could do nothing but watch. The same is true of the Romanian Revolution in the late 80s, when all faith in its communist regime and their dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was lost in the public, marking the end of communism in Romania altogether. Recall also during the Australian bushfires in 2020 how quickly Prime Minister Scott Morrison fled a fire-damaged town once the community turned on him. It’s a fine line between power and pain, for so quickly can the charade end when people discover the emperor has no clothes.
But it first lies in the responsibility of the individual. In spite of the argument presented here, it remains up to the individual to decide what to make of it. This argument, however, need not be specific to the tyranny outside. As I have written in previous essays, the outside world is an extension of the inside. Therefore tyranny can still exist in our lives on various levels: be it tyranny of the parent, of the partner, or of the persona. At the heart of all this lies the tyranny of the ego itself. Indeed, the tyrant is the embodiment of their unchained ego’s endless yearning for power. It is a struggle we all face internally. We must first recognise it in ourselves before acting.
To confront the tyranny inside and out is not to extinguish it completely. It is to live with it in a way that it works with us instead of over us. Governance, of course, has its place. Like the mind, it is “a wonderful servant but a terrible master.” Suppression will only push it to the side and aggravate it, where it will inevitably seep its way back into the centre, as history has proven. But it takes a simple act of courage to no longer fuel it, in the same way that the fire burns so long as the timber fuels it. We don’t want the fire to go out completely, but we also don’t want the world to burn around us. Like all things in Nature, it requires measure and balance.
Finally, we are left to ask ourselves what kind of life we want to live: Do we continue perpetuating a life of tyranny in every thought and action, despite how challenging it may be to contemplate otherwise; or do we wish to confront our fears and our doubts, discovering that we were confusing substance with shadow all along?
If this question still remains difficult to answer, remember it is essentially the same question we were presented with when moving out of home. Drawing closer to the moment, the very idea of leaving had us shaking in our boots. Yet we took the step, and here we are – still intact – at this new stage of life, with all the challenges and all the triumphs that come with it. Looking back we wonder why we ever waited so long! The scariest part of taking the leap was the procrastination at the precipice.