The Price of Obedience
Lately, I’ve been thinking, or rather wrestling, with this notion of rights. Not the performative, brochure kind we’re sold, but the kind that comes with the price. The kind that are treated, or rather handled, by those who believe they have any authority over what belongs to me.
This is about ME! This is about my money, this is about money due me! Which I WILL collect! 3.7 Million dollars! It's my nest egg, Jack. At my age you have to think ahead. Forgive me, I tend to chase squirrels in my mind. Back to my thoughts.
It’s strange. Almost a sick irony. That the very essence of my existence, my right to autonomy, can be treated as something up for discussion, something negotiable, something up for vote. I wrestle with the folly of letting the common herd vote on something as basic as my rights when they can’t even come to terms on what ought to go on a pizza or which milk makes a man more virtuous, oat or almond.
Now, I’m not claiming the common herd is foolish. Ah, fuck the fence-sitting. I’ll let Mr. Carlin take it from here before I get back to my own musings. Take it away Mr.Carlin!
I won’t pretend the common herd isn’t dumb, though heaven knows plenty of us are FUBAR, and some of us are cannibals cutting other people open like cantaloupes. But when I look at it through the lens of empathy, I begin to observe a different kind of picture and discern how much of this foolishness springs from the individual mind and how much rides along with the herd, unexamined and unquestioned.
When every impulse is peddled as “individuality” and every whim paraded as “self-expression,” the notion of community slips away. It sits there like an old relic on display, admired from afar but never actually inhabited. I confess, and it pains me to say it. I’m stuck somewhere between pity and thinking they’ve earned it, watching as so many abandon community for the comforting lie of individuality.
So I ask myself if Tom, Dick, குப்பன், சுப்பன், and Harriet flaunt the cleverness they delude themselves into believing on account of every prefab piece is pre-chewed, pre-fed, pre-approved, worse when independent thought is forbidden, punished, and policed, and utterly worse when questioning itself becomes a crime against conformity, how can I trust them to think critically enough to vote on rights?
I’m supposed to be grateful for a system that calls itself democratic. Fine. Consider me grateful enough. After all, there are people who’d kill just for the privilege of pretending their voice counts, so who am I to sneer? But what exactly am I choosing? The “choices” I’m offered for who speaks in my name feel about as meaningful as picking a flavor of bottled water.
Aquafina இருக்க? அக்காவ பத்தி பேசுனா செருப்பாலயே அடிப்பேன்! Chasing squirrels again.
Sure, they’ve got labels, and they’ll tell you there’s a difference, but close your eyes and it all tastes like the same lukewarm tap with a trace of lead. The faces don’t change, just the slogans. Every few years they dust off the same promises, slap on a new sticker, and call it progress. Every time some officious ruler of the herd claims the right to “debate” my freedom, a little more of me drifts beyond the grasp of common sense. It is not a tragedy. It is a flaw baked into the very design of democracy.
I am not saying the system is a lie and I never shall for, in the end, even the most chaotic democracy is preferable to the boot of a dictator. No, what troubles me is the nature of my rights and how effortlessly they can be ignored, bent, or parcelled out by forces I neither chose nor control. And that is the quiet terror of it, a form of control that does not strike with the obvious force of tyranny but creeps like a shadow through everyday life, shaping, bending, and dictating without ever announcing itself.
It slips in through forms, words, guidelines, forced arbitration, the removal of headphone jacks and calling it "courage," the subtle renaming of enclaves of the sea to sound patriotic to distract from pressing scandals,1 altering films to correct the language,2 removing films and music you purchased, only for them to disappear when licensing expires, game studios releasing half-baked titles on day one, only to patch them later, conditioning you to accept incompleteness as normal, software companies ever so gently ass fucking with no lube, all because you didn’t slog through a labyrinth of legalese masquerading as terms and conditions or endure the even more ghoulish fate of having no fucking option to opt the fuck out of their updates, social media platforms removing posts under vaguely defined rules, the establishment deciding which businesses are essential and which are not, inoculating people with chemical cocktails and shrugging when some die...
Time for a break from text. Check out these examples from a tech context in Watch Dogs 2, created a decade ago...
... or to quote my boy Diamond Pearl
தீமை என்பது...
ஆமை போல் நுழைவது...
புத்தியை கொல்வது...
போதை அது.
You believe you have power because you voted? You do not. The instant you accept that your rights are negotiable, that they’re up for grabs, you’ve already lost. When enough hands reach for what is yours, they’ll justify it. They’ll sell it to you in pieces, under the guise of necessity, safety, or order.
Lincoln said government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. A century later, Osho remarked, 'Yeah… but the people are retarded.' And now, looking around, one cannot help but see how profoundly true both statements remain. The people… the people today… make it almost impossible to argue otherwise.
So fuck no. My rights are not up for discussion. They’re not even up for a vote. They’re mine. Mine to hold, mine to defend, mine to grip onto when the world’s trying to yank them away. And anyone who thinks otherwise? They’re about to run headfirst into a principle that doesn’t give a damn about laws, or men, or whatever temporary authority thinks it’s in charge.
I’ll leave you with the clip that sparked this quiet wrestling about my rights. About a month ago, I went to a screening of The Matrix with my wife, and we both felt this scene very deeply. Now that we are older, a little wiser, still carrying the scars of our childhood, it offered us a rare, grounded clarity amid the fragments of the world as we’ve come to experience it.
And to end this scrawl, in a nod to Fincher — the first time I watched The Matrix, it was Friday, April 2nd, 1999, 9:30 pm, at Paramount Famous Players in Montreal. I was sixteen.
Thanks for reading,
V.