The possibilty of resistance

By Evangelos Lambrinoudis

The word ‘war’ has been pondered, written and spoken about since the beginning of wars, which date back to the beginning of the human experience. A war by my definition is an entrepreneurial adventure where one group, either by greed or necessity, decides it needs to rape, pillage and control the assets of another group. Both historical and modern examples of this definition should be obvious, but there is an underlying implication that you might have missed. It’s easy to look at your television or computer screen and voyeuristically follow world events/spectacles and feel a certain safety with our own experience here in Canada, but the truth is there is a war going on here at home too. The system under which we live — the organizations and institutions that administer and manage our mundane existences — have a primary function of raping and pillaging our souls and our resources.

The war at home, the war that’s happening against you and me is not a war of just capital, but includes a war to control your spirituality, intellect, ability to make sober decisions and every choice you make to spend the labour you’ve accumulated. Media, government and scholastic institutions promise you that things are the way they are because we have somehow agreed or asked for this lifestyle — as if our grandparents signed a mythic social contract at the founding of civilization — but watching the world fight and suffer while we drown ourselves in mindless hedonism has everything to do with an agenda set up and perfected since the beginning of the human experience, the beginning of wars.

Those of us who can see there is a problem with the way we live and how much we have to rape, pillage and control to maintain these hedonistic lifestyles must understand that something has to be done. Our human bodies will one day die and, regardless of our material lives, the energy we have accumulated with our individual existence will continue to exist regardless of your metaphysical or spiritual beliefs.

Fear not, there is a way that we can attempt to purify and reclaim the world of this energy so that when we do die we can leave in it peace.

First of all, turn off your tvs and laptops. The first thing you’re going to want to do to regain your autonomy and spiritual self is to remove the distractions and white noise. The second thing is to stop buying all the shit that’s keeping you attached and addicted to the system. Skip on the coffee today, stop eating so much sugar, take a month off drinking and doing drugs and don’t buy any useless material possessions. I promise you after the first month you’ll begin to feel painful withdrawals. The whole point here is to abandon your attachments to both the future and the past — to live in the moment.

Don’t stop there. You’ve got a lot of work to do if you’re going to win this war. Challenge your professors, start writing, speak up in class. If you take control of your education you might actually start learning something, rather then waiting for your $40,000 jumbo bachelor certificate to arrive in the mail. Faculty, staff and professors have coerced us to think that the only formidable measure of performance in a university is to cough-up papers, but the truth is that you very rarely can write anything in school without discovering an endless series of creative and intellectual limits — and don’t forget to cite your sources, since you weren’t allowed to have original ideas anyhow.

The ideological attachment of our western society is to constantly use and abuse all resources, while maintaining that we are special and unique individuals. It’s when we escape selfish conventions that we see we are not just ourselves, that even on the most scientific molecular level you can’t define the space that your self ends and the next person begins.

If you simply ignore all the things I’ve said, history as it has been efficiently designed will continue to repeat itself, and the conquerors will continue to give birth to the conquered. Take some action and take some control in your life, like I have, and live resistant to the system. If you can do all these things for a few months and you’re feeling awful, that’s alright because this is war and when you start to resist or live a resistant lifestyle it’s inherent that you’re going to get a little hurt. That’s how the system keeps us in check. Modern happiness is a empty promise often confused with hedonism, and no one deserves to feel good all the time. Give up your old ways, control your own life, think for yourself, end the cycle of repression. End the repetition of wars.

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