Born into the Bondage of Civilization
By: Charles Jalkh/Freedom Fighter

January 02/08

As ageless freedom fighters, we revolt against all systems that enslave the human spirit. We delude ourselves claiming to fight against tyranny, yet time after time we build a new dominating “system”, another judgmental social order, new laws that mostly serve to further legislate our liberty. We devise alternative value systems which usher new “tyrannies” of ideas built on the ashes of older traditions, all in the name of Freedom. Since the dawn of civilizations, we have cycled through endless ideological struggles against the establishments and installed “New World Orders” that swiftly turned into yet another establishment. Revolutions followed by counter-revolutions. Babylon, Athens, Rome, Berlin, all had their “Good” day becomes tomorrow’s “Evil”.

Who is free? Are you? Whether citizen of this over-regulated first world society, or a sister from the third world oppressed by ideologies of hate? Regardless of which human society we are born in, from America to Afghanistan, we are all enslaved into the bondage of laws, rules, and regulations. We are indoctrinated first by our family, by religion, by the school, society, and finally the State. “This” behavior is encouraged and we will reward you, that one is forbidden and we shall starve you. Rebel and we will crush you under our “Justice” system. Kneel, obey, work in line, and we will feed you from the monopolized resources of this planet. First the collective polices us directly, later it implants deterrent beliefs within our own mind, so we become our own police hitting our own head with the invisible baton of “values”. Our chains are no longer physical nor externally imposed. Should we be “lawless” in order to escape the “New Law”?

By early teen, we lose our angelic, care-free, and “self-unaware” state as the tyrant of ideals moves in. We then spend the rest of our lives robotically repeating our days in fear of change, overheating in search of thirsty desires, and ever hungrier wants. We extend control over others to shore up our solitude and gratify and comfort our ego. We do it in obedience to human laws, in conditioning to cultural programming. Our Ego rises to merge with the Collective Egos in their dance around the fire of life, often in ignorance, and driven by the instinct of the herd. We were once born into a freedom cloud floating on “original innocence”, only to be swiftly herded through conditioning into the bondage of civilization and saddled with the mythical guilt of the “original sin”. We left Paradise and non-self-awareness, to enter a dungeon of egotistic existence wearing the mask of Narcissist Self-consciousness, with concerns of yesterday that is far gone, and worries of tomorrow that is not here, disconnected from life in the extrovert blissful instant moment.

Throughout the ages, they kept conditioning you and asking you to control yourself and conform to the precepts of some value system or another. They persistently kept calling “you”, “You”, behave yourself, until you started thinking in terms of “I”. In order to “control” yourself you had to “observe” yourself. Your ego was born as a byproduct of the knowledge of Good and Evil. It then swiftly took control over your consciousness painfully disconnecting it from your living entity, then rushed to lead you to its own perceived salvation. This new mental “I” dressed with a personality, has a birthday and a death day, beginnings and ends, memories, desires and “possessions”, fears, regrets, greed, passion, wants, and aspirations. In short, it is the mortal in us. It relates to family and children as possessions of happiness instead of photonic waves of loving comfort. It has learned required rules and in the process wiped out your free nature and replaced it with your robotic compliance to norms. So where is human freedom, where is the free spirit, where is mother liberty, brother fraternity, and sister equality? Are they all just illusions or noise from the human stable? We are all equal in our slavery under the system. Pity the human race, for we are all born into the bondage of civilization and the tyranny within. Our “I” keeps running us in circles, as we throw the bone of our desires forward, then run to catch it and bring it back to “Master” who consumes it with an everlasting hunger, then as the addict that he is, throws the bone of another desire.

In Genesis, God instructs humans to Eat from all the trees of the garden including “The Tree of Life”, but not eat from “The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil”. Not to create value classifications seemed to be the first commandment, for nature knows no Good nor Evil, it simply is. Our four billion years old planet was the theater for 12 mass specie extinctions, five of them sudden, all occurring without rules of Good and Evil, it simply was.

“And the Lord said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?”

The Bible, Genesis Chapter 3 , verse 11
In order for Adam to “see” himself naked, he had to “observe” himself. Thus was born the mental “I””, the Ego, conditioned by a set of rules defining good and evil relative only to itself. And shadows ever multiplied thereafter. Values and Ego both live and die together. There cannot be one without the other in being. They feed on each others, just like the Serpent nourishing from its tail.

Genesis 3-4
"You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

If God can create something out of nothing? Then are we (arrogantly) trying to become Gods when we create values which are “nothing” in nature and only exist within our Ego’s weighing system. We invent values then assign them to objects whose intrinsic essence stores itself not the value we assigned to it. The pain of loss of the object is proportional to the value we attached to it. We often glorify moral values and ideals, then march to them, sometimes worship and preach them while everything around us in nature remains amoral.

So Cheers to freedom fighters comrades of all ages, to all believers of greater causes, to the endless generations that glorified our plastic human existence as a pass time. Changing laws of the jungle does not change the nature of the jungle, and survival will always be for the fittest and adaptable.