Colonialism as spectral possession.
Persons with weapons arrived on shores where other persons already lived. The arriving persons wanted land, labor, gold, timber, bodies. They took what they could take. They killed persons who resisted. They enslaved persons who survived. They called this process by various names—civilization, mission, progress, empire—and these names helped them feel righteous while taking.
This happened. Specific persons did specific things to specific other persons. Ships carried specific bodies across specific waters. Whips struck specific backs. Chains bound specific wrists. Bullets entered specific chests. No abstraction called “colonialism” performed these acts. Persons performed them—persons with names, faces, appetites, fears. Some wore uniforms. Some wore robes. Some sat in offices thousands of miles from the blood, signing papers that authorized the bleeding.
When persons today speak of “colonialism” as though it acts, as though it decides, as though it continues operating as some invisible agent requiring “dismantling”—they create a spook. They summon a ghost. And ghosts make convenient enemies because ghosts cannot negotiate, cannot make specific concessions, cannot sign treaties or return specific stolen goods. Only persons can do these things. But fighting a ghost requires no such specificity. Fighting a ghost allows you to fight forever without winning or losing, without finishing, without examining whether your fighting serves you or whether you serve your fighting.
I ask of every concept: does this serve me, or do I serve it? When I observe persons wielding “colonialism” as concept, I notice many of them serving the concept rather than using it. They let the concept tell them what to think, what to say, whom to condemn, whom to celebrate. They have made the concept their master. They have prostrated themselves before an abstraction.
When someone says “colonialism did this” rather than “specific persons did this,” I ask: who benefits from that phrasing?
The descendants of colonizers benefit. They can express regret about “colonialism” without examining their specific inheritance. The land their families hold, the wealth their families accumulated, the positions their families secured—all of this recedes into historical fog when we speak only of abstractions. No one demands they return specific stolen property, because “colonialism” stole it, and you cannot sue an abstraction or negotiate with an abstraction or shame an abstraction into restitution.
Persons who occupy government positions benefit. They can issue statements acknowledging “the colonial past” without transferring funds, without returning artifacts, without ceding territory. The statement costs nothing. The abstraction absorbs all responsibility and transforms it into symbolism. Representatives of the British government can visit former colonies, express profound regret about “what happened,” and return to London having changed nothing except their reputation among persons who value such gestures.
Persons who hold university positions benefit. They build careers studying “colonialism” as phenomenon, publishing papers, securing grants, earning tenure. The more abstract and complex they make their analysis, the more necessary their expertise becomes. They have material interest in keeping the concept abstract. Specific claims—”this family holds land stolen from that family in 1847”—require historians, not theorists. But “analyzing colonial epistemologies” and “interrogating settler frameworks” require specialists who have mastered the jargon.
And here I notice something: the persons who speak most loudly about colonialism often benefit from speaking loudly about it. They have positions, platforms, salaries, book contracts. They convert the suffering of colonized persons into career capital. Some do this consciously; most do it while believing themselves righteous. But the arrangement remains: they profit from producing and circulating this language. They benefit from their language-production. And this fact should make us suspicious of their analysis.
I have watched persons who call themselves leftists seize upon “colonialism” and make it central to their analysis. I have watched them subordinate every other concern—who owns what, who works for whom, who extracts surplus from whose labor—to this master concept. I have watched them develop elaborate hierarchies of victimhood, with “colonized peoples” at the top and everyone else arranging themselves according to proximity to that category.
What happened here? How did persons who once focused on ownership, on labor relations, on surplus extraction—how did these persons come to focus instead on identities, on historical grievances, on symbolic recognitions?
The answer: certain persons found this shift useful. Persons who hold academic positions found it useful because identity analysis generates infinite complexity, infinite publications, infinite conferences. Persons who run foundations found it useful because funding identity projects appears progressive without threatening the accumulation processes from which foundation wealth derives. Persons who run corporations found it useful because they can diversify their boards and hire sensitivity consultants without raising wages or empowering workers. Persons who hold political office found it useful because identity coalitions can substitute for worker solidarity, fragmenting potential opposition into competing grievance groups.
These persons wield the spook of “colonialism” to their benefit. When persons who labor for wages start asking who takes the surplus value they produce, redirect their attention to colonial history. When persons without property start asking who holds the deeds to the land they inhabit, redirect their attention to which colonial administrators originally stole it, rather than which persons currently extract rent. When persons crushed by rent and debt and precarity start asking who benefits from their misery, redirect their attention to microaggressions and cultural appropriation.
I do not deny that specific persons taking specific things from other persons through force happened, or that consequences persist. I deny that the current language-production about colonialism benefits the persons it claims to represent. Persons who produce and manage this language-production benefit from it. Everyone else gets ridden by the spook.
Nowhere does this capture appear more clearly than in discussions of Israel and Palestine. Here we have a situation of stark material simplicity: persons with weapons dispossess other persons of land, water, homes, lives. Persons with bulldozers demolish houses. Persons with rifles shoot children. Persons who control borders starve populations. Persons with bombs flatten neighborhoods.
Describe it this way—in terms of persons doing things to other persons—and the analysis requires no advanced degree. Anyone can see who holds the weapons, who lacks them, who takes, who loses. The response follows naturally: stop the persons doing these things, or help the persons resisting them, or at minimum stop providing weapons and money to the persons doing the dispossessing.
But observe what happens when “colonialism” enters the language. Suddenly we need experts to explain the situation. We need persons with history credentials to trace the genealogy of Zionism. We need persons with theory credentials to distinguish settler colonialism from extractive colonialism. We need persons with area studies credentials to analyze colonial epistemologies and subaltern subject positions. We need endless conferences, papers, panels, books—an entire industry of explanation that somehow never quite reaches the point of action.
And observe who populates this industry. Tenured professors in American universities. Foundation-funded NGO workers. Professional activists with speaking fees and book deals. Persons whose careers depend on the continuation of this language-production, which depends on the continuation of the situation. If Israeli forces stopped dispossessing Palestinians tomorrow, these persons would lose their subject matter. Their material interest lies in perpetual analysis, not resolution.
Meanwhile, Palestinians continue dying. Their homes continue falling. Their children continue starving. And the persons with the ability to stop this—persons in the American government who authorize weapons transfers, persons in European governments who provide diplomatic cover, persons who run corporations that profit from occupation—these persons face no consequences. The language-production about “settler colonialism” costs them nothing. They can even participate in it, expressing concern about “the situation” while signing the checks that fund the bombs.
I look at this and ask: whom does this language-production serve? Not the Palestinians. The Palestinians need weapons transfers to stop. They need the siege to lift. They need the settlements to cease. They need persons holding power to change their behavior. The language-production about “settler colonialism” accomplishes none of this. The language-production provides cover for inaction while appearing sophisticated. The language-production allows persons in powerful countries to feel engaged while their governments continue funding dispossession.
Consider the phrase “decolonize the curriculum.” This phrase has spread through universities in recent years. Persons who hold administrative positions now speak it at meetings. Persons who hold teaching positions now implement it in syllabi. Persons with titles create committees devoted to it.
What does this phrase mean? In practice, it means: add some books by authors from formerly colonized regions to reading lists. Hire some faculty members from underrepresented backgrounds. Create some courses that focus on non-European topics. Perhaps rename some buildings. Perhaps remove some statues.
Notice what this does not mean. It does not mean returning the land on which the university sits to the persons from whom earlier persons took it. It does not mean redistributing the university’s endowment to communities damaged by colonial extraction. It does not mean dismantling the administrative hierarchies that govern universities. It does not mean questioning whether universities themselves—as institutions that credential elites and reproduce class arrangements—might function as instruments serving those who benefit from colonial legacies.
“Decolonization” has become a metaphor, and the metaphor serves persons who run universities. Persons who hold administrative positions can “decolonize” while changing nothing fundamental about who controls resources, who makes decisions, who benefits from the institution’s operation. Persons running universities can perform decolonization while continuing to train managers for corporations that extract resources from regions their predecessors colonized, continuing to patent traditional knowledge for private profit, continuing to charge tuition that excludes persons without family wealth.
Persons who occupy positions in universities benefit from this metaphorical use. Administrators can claim progressiveness without altering budget priorities. Faculty can claim radicality without risking their positions. Students can claim engagement without confronting their own complicity in arrangements they claim to oppose. Everyone performs resistance while the persons who run the institution change nothing.
Persons who wield the spook of “decolonization” enable this arrangement. By making decolonization abstract—a matter of epistemology, of representation, of curriculum—they ensure it threatens nothing they value. They use the concept to colonize the radical impulse and domesticate it. What might have demanded material redistribution becomes a request for diverse reading lists. What might have challenged the persons who hold institutional power becomes another committee, another report, another strategic initiative.
Thomas Hobbes named the arrangement of centralized coercive power “Leviathan”—a biblical sea monster, a beast that devours and subsumes. Stirner adapted this image: persons who operate coercive institutions have developed techniques for absorbing opposition, for converting rebellion into administration, for recruiting revolutionaries into bureaucratic positions.
Watch how this absorption operates with “decolonization”:
Stage one: Persons in colonized territories demand actual decolonization—removal of colonial administrators, return of land, control of resources. They fight, sometimes win, sometimes lose.
Stage two: Persons in wealthy countries who sympathize with anti-colonial struggles adopt the concept and bring it to the metropole. They speak of “decolonizing” their own contexts.
Stage three: Persons running institutions notice this language spreading. Administrators recognize a threat—or an opportunity. They can suppress the language (costly, generates backlash) or absorb it (cheaper, generates legitimacy).
Stage four: Absorption begins. Persons running universities create positions in postcolonial studies. Persons running corporations hire diversity consultants. Persons running governments establish reconciliation commissions. Persons running institutions now channel the language of decolonization through institutional positions.
Stage five: Persons running institutions transform the language. “Decolonization” no longer means removing colonizers from colonies. It means reforming curricula, diversifying hiring, acknowledging land, changing names. It means everything except actual transfer of land, wealth, and decision-making power.
Stage six: Persons who use the original meaning find themselves marginalized. Persons running institutions have captured the word. To demand actual decolonization now sounds extreme, unrealistic, even violent—because “decolonization” has come to mean something gentler, something persons running institutions can accommodate.
This pattern repeats. Every radical concept undergoes this capture. Persons holding power have learned this technique: use the opponent’s momentum against them. Let the radicals develop the language, then capture the language and redirect its force.
Persons wielding the colonial spook assist this capture perfectly. By making “colonialism” abstract—a historical condition, an epistemological stance, a psychological inheritance—they allow persons running institutions to address it abstractly. Persons running institutions can decolonize abstractly while maintaining concrete control. They can perform transformation while preserving every arrangement that benefits them.
Here we arrive at the fundamental problem: persons who call themselves leftists have become instruments of persons who hold institutional power. They have made themselves useful to the persons they claim to oppose.
How? By replacing material analysis with identity analysis. By replacing worker solidarity with identity coalition. By replacing demands for redistribution with demands for recognition. By replacing the question “who owns what?” with the question “who feels represented?”
This replacement serves persons who own concentrated wealth. Persons who own factories, who extract rent, who collect interest—these persons face no threat from identity analysis. They can diversify their boardrooms, hire from underrepresented groups, sponsor pride parades and heritage months. None of this costs them ownership. None of this redistributes wealth. None of this challenges their position as the persons who own while others labor.
Persons wielding the colonial spook assist this process. By focusing attention on historical extraction rather than present extraction, they direct energy away from current beneficiaries. Yes, persons calling themselves colonizers stole land centuries ago—but who holds that land now? Who extracts rent from it now? Who profits from it now? These present persons escape attention while everyone argues about historical persons.
And when persons do notice present arrangements, persons wielding the colonial framework provide ready categories that fragment rather than unite. Workers divide into colonizer-descendant and colonized-descendant, settler and indigenous, categories mapped onto skin tone. Each category develops its own grievance, its own demands, its own spokespeople. The persons who own concentrated wealth—who extract surplus from workers of all categories—watch these divisions with satisfaction. Divided workers cannot threaten persons who own what workers produce.
Persons who call themselves leftists facilitate this division. They police each other’s language, check each other’s privilege, compete for victim status. They have absorbed a moral framework that judges persons by identity rather than by action, by ancestry rather than by present conduct. A billionaire of the right ancestry ranks higher than a laborer of the wrong one. A landlord of the right identity receives more sympathy than a tenant of the wrong one.
Persons wielding this framework serve persons holding concentrated power perfectly. They generate endless conflict among persons who might otherwise unite against common exploiters. They provide moral justification for the managers of language-production—the academics, journalists, NGO workers—who police the categories. They keep everyone busy with symbolic contests while material conditions deteriorate.
I refuse all of this. I ask: does this concept serve me? Does this framework advance my interests? Does this language-production help me get what I want, or does it merely recruit me into someone else’s project?
I want material things: food, shelter, pleasure, freedom from coercion. I want to spend my days as I choose, not as employers or persons with weapons dictate. I want to associate with persons who interest me and avoid persons who bore or threaten me. I want to create, to play, to fuck, to fight when fighting pleases me and rest when rest pleases me.
None of this requires “decolonization.” None of this requires correct positions on historical extraction. None of this requires participation in endless language-production about who wronged whom centuries ago.
What helps me get these things? Clear analysis of who currently takes what from whom and how. Understanding of the actual mechanisms by which persons holding power maintain their position. Identification of the specific persons who benefit from my dispossession and the specific means by which they dispossess me.
When I examine my situation clearly, I find: persons who own concentrated wealth extract surplus from my labor. Persons who hold titles to land extract rent from my need for shelter. Persons with weapons enforce these arrangements if I resist. Persons with credentials legitimate these arrangements through language-production. These persons have names, addresses, vulnerabilities. They can negotiate, or they can lose.
Persons wielding the colonial spook obscure this clarity. When I accept their framing, I direct my attention to historical patterns rather than present persons. I fragment potential allies along identity lines. I let myself get recruited into projects that serve academics and NGO workers rather than serving me. I accept endless complexity where simplicity would threaten persons holding power.
I reject the spook. I did not cause colonialism and I cannot undo it. I can only act in my present, for my present interests, using what power I can accumulate. If persons wish to ally with me for mutual advantage, their ancestry matters less than their reliability. If persons wish to exploit me, their victim status matters less than their actual threat.
A particular species of person has emerged in recent decades: the guilt priest. This person specializes in producing guilt in others. This person develops elaborate frameworks explaining why certain persons should feel guilty about conditions they did not create and cannot change.
The guilt priests serve persons holding institutional power. Guilty persons make obedient subjects. Guilty persons accept punishments they do not deserve. Guilty persons work harder, pay more, demand less. Guilty persons police themselves and each other, saving persons running coercive institutions the trouble.
Persons wielding the colonial framework generate guilt expertly. They tell you: persons whose ancestors committed atrocities should feel guilty. Persons who benefit from past atrocities should feel guilty. Persons who fail to perform adequate awareness of past atrocities should feel guilty. They ramify the guilt endlessly, implicating everyone except the priests who administer it.
And what do guilty persons do? They pay the priests. They attend workshops on their privilege. They buy books explaining their complicity. They donate to organizations that employ the priests. They adopt the language, the postures, the expressions of concern that the priests prescribe. They become good penitents, and their penance flows to the persons who defined their sin.
I refuse guilt. Guilt-producers benefit from the guilt they produce, not the persons they make feel guilty. I did not choose my ancestry, my birthplace, my position in historical processes I did not create. I can only act from where I stand, with what I have, toward what I want. If my actions harm others, I may choose to stop—not from guilt but from preference, from recognition that harming harms me, from calculation that cooperation works better than exploitation. But guilt as such? Guilt without action? Guilt that produces only more guilt and more payment to guilt-producers? This I reject.
Let the priests find other penitents. Let them sell their absolutions elsewhere. I have my affairs to attend to.
If we dissolve the colonial spook, what remains?
Persons. Actions. Things.
Specific persons who currently hold land they did not work and cannot use except by extracting rent from persons who need it. Specific persons who currently run companies that extract resources from regions inhabited by other persons who receive little benefit. Specific persons who currently occupy government positions that protect these arrangements through rules enforced by persons with weapons.
These persons have addresses. These arrangements have vulnerabilities. These arrangements depend on compliance they cannot perfectly enforce.
The question becomes: what do I want, and how can I get it?
If I want land, I look for land and the means to take or hold it. If I want freedom from wage labor, I look for ways to survive without selling my time. If I want community with persons who share my interests, I look for such persons and propose mutual aid.
None of this requires solving colonialism. None of this requires correct historical analysis. None of this requires permission from priests.
And if I encounter others who want similar things, we can combine forces—not from duty, not from solidarity-as-obligation, but from mutual advantage. The persons who dispossess me may well dispossess them too. The persons who cage me may well cage them. Against common enemies, temporary alliance serves. When alliance no longer serves, I dissolve it without guilt.
This describes the union of egoists. Not a political program, not a moral framework, not an identity. A practical arrangement among persons who see advantage in cooperation and dissolve the arrangement when advantage ends.
Let me trace the mechanism more precisely. Persons who run institutions—universities, governments, corporations, NGOs—face a recurring problem: other persons resist them. Other persons notice exploitation and object. Other persons organize, protest, sometimes threaten the arrangements from which persons running institutions benefit.
The older response: suppress the resistance. Send persons with weapons. Cage the organizers. Kill the most dangerous. This works, but it costs resources and generates sympathy for the suppressed.
The newer response: absorb the resistance. Learn its language. Hire its spokespeople. Create positions for its theorists. Fund its organizations—on the condition that they remain organizations, with budgets to protect and careers to advance, rather than movements that might actually dismantle institutional arrangements.
Watch how this operates with “decolonization”:
Stage one: Persons in colonized territories demand actual decolonization—removal of colonial administrators, return of land, control of resources. They fight, sometimes win, sometimes lose.
Stage two: Persons in wealthy countries who sympathize with anti-colonial struggles adopt the concept and bring it to the metropole. They speak of “decolonizing” their own contexts.
Stage three: Persons running institutions notice this language spreading. Administrators recognize a threat—or an opportunity. They can suppress the language (costly, generates backlash) or absorb it (cheaper, generates legitimacy).
Stage four: Absorption begins. Persons running universities create positions in postcolonial studies. Persons running corporations hire diversity consultants. Persons running governments establish reconciliation commissions. Persons running institutions now channel the language of decolonization through their positions.
Stage five: Persons running institutions transform the language. “Decolonization” no longer means removing colonizers from colonies. It means reforming curricula, diversifying hiring, acknowledging land, changing names. It means everything except actual transfer of land, wealth, and decision-making power.
Stage six: Persons who use the original meaning find themselves marginalized. Persons running institutions have captured the word. To demand actual decolonization now sounds extreme, unrealistic, even violent—because “decolonization” has come to mean something gentler, something persons running institutions can accommodate.
This pattern repeats. Every radical concept undergoes this capture. Persons holding power have learned this technique: use the opponent’s momentum against them. Let the radicals develop the language, then capture the language and redirect its force.
Persons wielding the colonial spook assist this capture perfectly. By making “colonialism” abstract—a historical condition, an epistemological stance, a psychological inheritance—they allow persons running institutions to address it abstractly. Persons running institutions can decolonize abstractly while maintaining concrete control. They can perform transformation while preserving every arrangement that benefits them.
Return now to Palestine with this analysis.
For decades, persons resisting Israeli dispossession framed their struggle in material terms: land stolen, homes demolished, persons killed, borders closed. They demanded material things: return of refugees, end of occupation, control of resources.
Then the academic-NGO complex discovered Palestine. Persons holding academic positions developed sophisticated analyses of settler colonialism. Persons with theory credentials compared Israel to South Africa, to the American frontier, to Australia. The language-production proliferated: conferences, journals, book series, academic positions.
And something shifted. The material demands—land, water, sovereignty—receded behind conceptual demands. “Recognition” of colonial status. “Acknowledgment” of Nakba. “Awareness” of apartheid. Symbolic victories that changed nothing on the ground.
Persons running Israeli institutions learned to navigate this language-production. They hired their own academics to produce counter-analyses. They funded their own NGOs to contest the framing. They generated their own complexity to match the complexity of their critics. The language-production became a terrain of struggle—but a terrain that cost persons running Israeli institutions nothing materially. Arguments about whether Israel “technically” qualifies as settler colonialism matter less than whether Palestinians have water.
Meanwhile, the persons who actually dispossess Palestinians—the soldiers, the settlers, the administrators, the weapons manufacturers, the politicians—continued their work. The language-production about their work proliferated around them like fog, obscuring clear sight.
I look at this and ask: what has the language-production accomplished? Has it stopped a single bullet? Has it rebuilt a single home? Has it opened a single border?
The language-production has accomplished careers. It has accomplished publications. It has accomplished positions and platforms and speaking fees and book contracts for persons who analyze the situation. These accomplishments benefit specific persons—but not Palestinians. Not even waving Palestinian flags and wearing keffiyehs benefits Palestinians - these are made in China.
Palestinians need the weapons shipments to stop. They need the siege to lift. They need the settlements to cease. They need persons holding power to change their behaviour. The language-production about “settler colonialism” accomplishes none of this. The language-production provides cover for inaction while appearing sophisticated. The language-production allows persons in powerful countries to feel engaged while their governments continue funding dispossession.
Now I must turn the analysis on myself. Even this essay risks becoming a spook.
“Egoism” can become a spook if I let it ride me. If I start asking “what would a true egoist do?” rather than “what do I want?”—I have found a new master. If I police my thoughts for insufficient egoism, if I perform detachment I do not feel, if I adopt egoist identity rather than practicing egoist analysis—the hobgoblin rides again.
The same applies to spook-dissolution itself. I can become so focused on dissolving abstractions that the dissolution becomes my program, my duty, my identity. I can become a priest of anti-priesthood, enforcing the requirement that no requirements exist.
Stirner knew this. He wrote: “Names don’t name it.” Whatever we call it, the moment we name it, we have created something that can become a spook. Even “the unique,” even “ownness,” even “creative nothing”—all of these can become concepts that command rather than tools that serve.
So I offer this essay not as doctrine but as tool. Use what serves. Discard what does not. If dissolving the colonial spook helps you see more clearly, helps you identify who actually threatens you and what you actually want—use the dissolution. If the dissolution itself becomes a burden, another concept demanding loyalty—discard it without guilt.
I take what serves and leave the rest. Including the concept of egoism itself.
Let me close with what refuses the spook.
Somewhere, persons resist who have never read colonial theory. They resist because persons with weapons threaten their children. They resist because persons with bulldozers approach their homes. They resist from the simple calculus that resistance offers better odds than submission.
These persons do not need academics to explain their situation. They do not need frameworks to justify their response. They do not need workshops on decolonization or papers on settler colonialism or panels at conferences where professors explain their oppression to each other.
They need weapons. They need food. They need allies who will actually risk something.
The language-production provides none of these. The language-production provides careers for priests and salves for guilty consciences and endless complexity that substitutes for action. The language-production serves the persons who produce it, not the persons it claims to represent.
I align myself with the resisters, not the priests. Not from moral obligation—I have dissolved morality with the other spooks—but from recognition. The persons who fight their dispossessors act from the same impulse I feel: the refusal to submit, the insistence on pursuing one’s own interests against those who would crush them.
This alignment takes whatever form serves. Sometimes words—like these words, which may reach persons who can use them. Sometimes things—supplies, money, shelter for those who fight. Sometimes presence—the body in the way of the bulldozer, the hands linking with other hands.
But never guilt. Never language-production for its own sake. Never the elaborate performances that serve priests and institutions while material conditions remain unchanged.
Many persons have let the spook of colonialism capture them. They let it ride them toward destinations that serve others. I refuse the ride. I walk my own path, toward my own ends, making what alliances serve and dissolving them when they stop serving.
This refusal itself constitutes resistance. Against arrangements that demand ideological capture, that insist every person adopt the correct framework and mouth the correct phrases and subordinate themselves to the correct abstractions—against these arrangements, the person who simply refuses, who asks “what do I want?” and pursues it without permission, has already escaped.
Certain persons running certain institutions need your belief. They need you to accept that “colonialism” operates as real force, that “decolonization” names a real process, that your participation in the language-production matters. Without this belief, the priests have no congregation. Without this belief, the persons running institutions have no legitimacy for their absorption maneuvers. Without this belief, the whole elaborate machinery of guilt and performance and symbolic action collapses.
You have the ability to withdraw belief. Simply stop. Stop feeling guilty about history you did not make. Stop performing awareness for audiences you do not respect. Stop pretending that language-production changes material conditions. Stop serving concepts that demand your service while delivering nothing you actually want.
Start instead from want. What do you want? Food, shelter, pleasure, freedom from coercion, meaningful activity, genuine connection with other persons—these things you can name, pursue, potentially achieve. Not through correct analysis but through action. Not through language-production but through doing. Not through serving any concept but through serving yourself.
Let the priests keep their temples. Let the academics keep their conferences. Let the NGO workers keep their funding cycles and the politicians their expressions of concern.
I keep myself. And from that keeping, everything else follows—or nothing at all, and that too I can live with. The persons who matter—the persons who fight, who build, who create, who risk—they understand this already. They do not need my essay to tell them. They act from their own necessity, their own desire, their own calculation of odds.
If my words reach such persons and prove useful, good. If my words reach priests and provoke anger, also good—their anger confirms the diagnosis. If my words reach no one, disappear into the digital void, accomplish nothing—this too I can accept. I wrote because writing pleased me, because the analysis needed articulating, because I wanted to see these thoughts outside my head.
That wanting sufficed. No larger purpose required. No contribution to historical processes, no building toward future conditions, no movement to serve. Just this: I wanted, so I did. My position in miniature.
And now the essay ends, and I return to the rest of my life—which continues regardless of colonial spooks and academic priests and institutional absorptions. My hunger continues. My pleasures continue. My projects continue. Persons running various institutions make their demands, and I negotiate with some, refuse others, and pursue my own ends through whatever means present themselves.
This describes freedom: not an abstraction that commands, but a practice that continues. Not a concept to achieve, but an activity to perform. Not a state to reach, but a verb to conjugate, endlessly, until the body that conjugates it finally stops.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.