Take Your Life into Your Own Hands
The Second Song tells the adherent to be free. And who among us does not wish to be free? But what does freedom mean? How do we know that we are free? Slave masters and jailers tell us again and again that we are free. Because, if we believe we are free, why would we attempt to escape. The best prison is that one you do not know constrains you.
So then, how do you know that you are free? Two simple metrics. Is you life in your own hands? And can you walk away? We will come to the second in due course. Today we are examining the first question. Is your life in your own hands. To be an adult you must take Your Life into Your Own Hands. Anyone whose life is in the hands of others is a child. What does this mean? It means that you must be responsible for your life. It means you must take responsibility for your actions. You life belongs in your own hands. And you are responsible for you life, for good and for ill.
To claim responsibility for other adults is to claim ownership, and to claim ownership of others is to build the Hungry Empire. And likewise, to accept that another is responsible for you is to accept that you are owned. Anyone who owns, or who is owned, is not free. The chain binds both ways. And as soon as you allow yourself to be added to the chain, you join the Hungry Empire.
Defend Your Ability Walk Away
Once you have accepted responsibility for your own life, you have secured your freedom on an emotional and mental level. Now you must secure your freedom on a practical and logistical level. You must defend your ability to walk away from any unfavorable arrangement. This does not mean that you must walk away. This means that you must ensure that you are able to walk away if necessary, and if you choose. The right to abstain is freedom. The right stop is freedom. The right to change your mind, even your allegiance, is freedom.
Anyone who cannot walk away is a prisoner or a slave. If you cannot abstain, you are forced. If you cannot leave, you are constrained. The ability to abstain or refuse consent is a mark of a community’s health. If another believes they have the right to constrain your or to deny you consent, then they believe that they own you. And so, again, we return to ownership.
To seek to cage others is to build the Hungry Empire. This is why modern society has such a conflicted relationship with the idea of consent. Because the Hungry Empire is built upon a denial of consent. And the more progressive activists seek to universalize consent, the more the Glass Tower trembles and the harsher is responds. Tears gas hurled is hurled at protesters. Marginalized people are murdered by agents of the state. These are signs that the Locust King is scared of the direction that culture is heading. And this is the direction in which you must head if you wish to be an adult. Develop escape plans, even if they are only as a failsafe. You can be free anywhere, so long as you have to ability to leave at any time. Defend your ability to walk away, or accept your chains and surrender. Those are your only choices.
The Second Song and Suicide
Trigger Warning: Suicide
I have a question for you. Why does society consider suicide immoral? And to be clear, I am not asking why society considers suicide sad or tragic. I am asking why would a society consider suicide to be immoral? A sin. Evil. A crime.
The answer is brutally simple. Suicide is a way of abstaining that kings and conquerors have a hard time controlling. Runaway slaves can be run down on horses and brought back in chains. Conscientious objectors and rebels can be locked up in prisons. But preventing somebody from committing suicide is much more difficult. And suicide is a final, ultimate, way of walking away.
If a person buys in to the idea that suicide is immoral, and voluntarily takes suicide off the table, then their oppressor is free to make the oppression as bad as the oppressor likes. Suicide is the final veto an individual has. If a person decides that their life is worse than actually not existing, then Locust King has pushed that person to a place where the Hungry Empire can no longer enslave them. Look at the afterlives conceived by the Hungry Empire. We have afterlives where the servants must continue to serve their god kings. We have afterlives where those who rebel or kill themselves are tortured for eternity. We have afterlives that are themselves mirrors of the Hungry Empire. The mythology of the Hungry Empire is designed to convince the enslaved that there is no escape. Suicide is a tactic that deprives the empire of their slaves.
If suicide is considered immoral, if suicide is taken off the table as a option, then a method of walking away has been taken off the board. And the Hungry Empire is desperate to take all methods of walking away off the table. We have examples of the empire tattooing and scarring slaves so that they can be identified even if they escape. We have examples of Empire massacring whole groups of people who refuse to join the empire. The empire cannot tolerate anyone escaping. Any escape is unacceptable. The empire must grow. The empire needs labor. The empire needs slaves. And so suicide is sinful to the Locust King, because that is another slave that cannot labor to make the empire grow.
To be clear, this is not an argument in favor of suicide. This is also not an argument against suicide. We are not discussing whether suicide is a good thing. We are not discussing whether somebody should or should not commit suicide. We are discussing why the Hungry Empire has a vested interest in closing that path to the people whom they oppress. And so, when you assess suicide and consider the morality of suicide, remember that much of what is floating around in your head about suicide is pro-slavery propaganda.
Recommended Reading
- The Art of Not Being Governed, by James C. Scott
- Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen
- Brian’s Winter, by Gary Paulsen
- Brian’s Return, by Gary Paulsen
- Radical Simplicity by Dan Price
Professor Harbinger's School for Villains 