Morality As Self Police, Commodity And Identity
By: Lain Cortés González
Tags: Morality, State, Politics, Essay, Ideology

The socialist sins by trying to state its ideology as scientific, just another fetishization of science and of the ideology itself, that confuses the nature of the methods of science, it sins of scientificism at its best case scenario. Most of time implying a translation or devirtualization of the theory into a moral project.

[…]Instead of creating a subversively radical social theory in concert with other rebels and putting it into practice with them with the aim of directly eliminating as many aspects of domination and social alienation as possible (MacQuinn, 2004).

This is way more painfully obvious in the progressive strains of leftism, or even the centre, or some right-wing projects, that aim for the separation of the religion of the mystical — and mythical from the earthly, meaning the State, but can’t conceive a rewriting of morality, it then becomes just an overthrowing of the king. It’s imperative to not fall to the trap of considering an objective truth, or based on reality, that can be used to justify by begging to the idea of common sense or reason.

Nonetheless I’d point out that the State will always use a fetishized form of morality to sustain and legitimize its own existence and power, if it is allowed to me to be harsher with the State. It has no escape from this, and because of this I could separate it from any political project that is not the one of those in power.

The state, as a ruler, behaves the same way the church did. The latter is based on devoutness, the former on morality.[..] […]The state’s lauded tolerance is simply a tol­erance of the “inoffensive;’ the “innocuous”; it is only an elevation above small-mindedness, only a more respectable, more magnificent, prouder — despotism.[…]

This is not denying that the morality of such political projects is a morality that will always be based on power and force, or the potential of its execution, while reducing all their dialogue and speech to a mere business of isolated wrong or well doings, because there is nothing left than just assuring the position on the hierarchical position inside of the movement, of the organization, leaving behind the possibility to have any amount of understanding of the social and historical contexts in which such deeds are considered or become to be considered wrong or good.

The State doesn’t need this analysis, because it doesn’t base its actions on the good cause rather than on the presumed eternity of its own existence and the power the owner and the controllers of it might extract from it.

I have argued before that a lot of things seem to be turned into commodities from where I construct the self and an identity. The morality seems to not escape from this fetishization of the memes that make up what is understood as morality or the specific variation of this, it’s then that when I consume, and I drink from the fountain of what constitutes my morality as religion, that I only become possessed by it. The consumption of these memes is reflected in a kind of consumption that is just lifestyle moralism, instead of an actual attack or critic of the systems of alienation, segregation and of their institutions of domination through morality.

Being either of the two kind of entities that use a forced form or fixed form of morality, compulsory morality only serve for the higher essence that is trying to dominate the individuals. These are just pretended as ways to alienate the individual and strip it away from all its purposes and Property; never as an honest way to construct any kind of camaraderie between the individuals, regardless of the kind of camaraderie it is agreed upon such movements or institutions of representation, leaving only dominance and a pyramidal power.

People whose compulsory moralities are organized around these abstract ideas attempt to force themselves to follow their demands because they have displaced (projected or alienated) their own subjectivity onto them, usually through the influence of years and years of alienating and demoralizing socialization and indoctrination. Rather than understanding and acting for themselves the victims of morality attempt to make themselves the puppets of the abstract ideas they fetishize. (Jason MacQuinn, 2004)

And stripped away the individual from their Property, it can only accept peace, which is only attainable through a morality. Hence peace is the manifestation of the homeostasis and success of morality, the hegemonic process has reached its final form, its final consequence.

Anything that dares to question morality is someone that attempts against security, because security is comfort at the end, it is the presence of peace. And so, morality is not the only requirement for fascism, it is not enough condition for the birth of a police but it’s a necessary condition.

The new fascism is not politics and the economy of war. It is global agreement on security, on the maintenance of a “peace” just as terrifying as war. All our petty fears will be organized in concert, all our petty anxieties will be harnessed to make micro-fascists of us; we will be called upon to stifle every little thing, every suspicious face, every dissonant voice, in our streets, in our neighborhoods, in our theaters. Gilles Deleuze, The Rich Jew

We made ourselves, thanks to our morality and our fears, especially of the unknown or unpredictable, our own police living in our brains.

If we assume as the understanding of our struggle: our rejection of the State or rejection of any higher power, we can’t imitate its ways, because then we would be only giving to such higher powers new faces that will laugh at us. Especially we shouldn’t turn morality memes into commodities that are only forced into the individual and has no regard on the context that such individual lives. Then, we must to build our not fetishized nor compulsory morality as means of our everydayness and enjoyment of life. We could construct our self-theory, loving the people we — as individuals — love and to build up a social-theory that exposes our complexities and diversity of selves, needs and experiences. Never we should relapse with new form of compulsory ways of understanding good and evil, my love for uniqueness and my Property, otherwise I’ll bring you hell, all the metallic taste on my tongue on yours, with fire and self determination, you’d be considered my otherness, the thing I can’t put my hands on, the source itself of my alienation I should rid of, emanating from a different part, but the same bullshit nonetheless. Fuck the State and its bourgeois values, indeed, but fuck all kind of fetishized and compulsory form of morality, love or hate.

The only really transparent, and thus revolutionary, communication is that which takes place when our selves and our desires are out in the open, when no morals, ideals, or constraints cloud the air. We will be amoralists, or we will be manipulators and manipulated. The only coherent organization is that in which we unite as individuals who are conscious of our desires, unwilling to give an inch to mystification and constraint, and unafraid to act freely in our own interests. (Jay Amrod and Lev Chernyi, 1996)

Postscript

I couldn’t nail how morality could indeed be part of what constitutes the origin, shaper and source of a identity, meaning: a generality, a law that makes the objects of its power indistinguishable from each other, being all of them substitutes of each other, generality, and identity, as we understand them, are nothing more than a law of exchange as criterion.

Then I had to talk of aspects that I wasn’t that sure of their relevance to the formation of such identities from morality but the only ones that I could talk of being mildly sure of its congruency and pertinacity to the text.

This kind of relation between the objects of such laws are born from such hegemony that is presented as a priori to any evaluation of the object, because that’s morality: a narration of what is right to be and what is wrong to claim for yourself, it dictates as well our everyday and in return we’re possessed in such way that even a questioning to such construction or identity, once finished and stabilized (state that is just like differentials in mathematics exist as a concept and abstraction), feels like a questioning to the existence itself of the individual, the individual then redden against such affront, given the non conformity with given a set of moral rules. The laws of generality then are rules of habit and an ambiguity is born in conscience:

Conscience, however, suffers from the following ambiguity: it can be conceived only by supposing the moral law to be external, superior and indifferent to the natural law; but the application of the moral law can be conceived only by restoring to conscience itself the image and the model of the law of nature. As a result, the moral law, far from giving us true repetition, still leaves us in generality. This time, the generality is not that of nature but that of habit as a second nature. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.

And then it follows that for being able to reject morality, being a generality, is what I argue to do in this essay, or as Deleuze suggests:

The other way, by contrast, is to overturn the law by descending towards the consequences, to which one submits with a too-perfect attention to detail.

The weapon is yours to choose.