The Rebel

The students are marching.

Now, this is a series on resistance, and I've based it largely, or not largely, but sort of inspirationally from Camus' The Rebel.

And right now in France, there is this amazing moment where the students are rising.

And this has so many of the issues that we've discussed are right here happening right now today that I thought it might be worth taking a moment to pause and say, you know, what's happening? If you've heard about this in the news, to talk about the nuances of what's actually happening, why it's happening, what it means.

the government may be forced to sit down with the students.

And that brings us full course around to the joys of resistance.

And in the opening of Camus' The Rebel, which I talked about in the first essay, what he talks about is he says the saying no has this incredible impact because it defines you.

When you say no to something, you're also saying yes to something, but you're also saying, I have power, I have authority, I matter.

But I, I believe, you know, Camus' time during World War II, and especially what happens later in his life, is when he's sort of forced to reckon with the idea of, okay, you have this philosophy of the absurd for the individual, but now what do you do? What is your responsibility to your society, to your people? And Camus, you can see it dur- during World War II, he rebels, right? He, he fights back against the Nazis.

And his essay is 1954, I can't remember if that's the exact date, essay "The Rebel," [swallows] um, is where he sort of evolves his philosophy of the absurd, and he starts to talk about it in a more societal aspect.

What do you do when an...

Like, what does the individual do with the absurd? Okay, now what does society do with the absurd, and what is the individual's responsible to an absurd world and an absurd society? Um, and so, like, that is where his philosophy evolves, and it sort of...

as you reflect on or even participate in what your own personal ideas of resistance might be and why, as I mentioned over and over again, joy is such an important part of all of this to me, which will become clearer.

Now, if any of you read Camus, The Rebel, which inspired me in some ways to think about doing this project, then you probably encountered a lot of literary criticism.

And this may have surprised you.

You're like, hey, there's a lot of literature being discussed, articulated, quoted, analyzed in his argument.

And because it never stops, why should we expect us to stop? I mean, we're mortal, so we will stop at some point, but we shouldn't stop until then, expect to stop changing, to growing, to needing more insight, to needing more reflection.

And again, answers cause that to stop.

And so this is what Camus was on about, about the rebel, about resistance, about fighting back, and why I think it's so important to emphasize the joy of resistance.

Because one, it's not going to stop.

Remember, by the way, Camus is a rebel.

He wrote The Rebel.

He fought in the French resistance during the war.

We need to remember this about him.

Were these poems the only expressly Satanist writings of Karl Marx? We do not know because the bulk of his works is kept secret by those who guard his manuscripts.

In The Revolted Man, Albert Camus stated that 30 volumes of Marx and Engels have never been published and expressed the presumption that they are not much like what is generally known as Marxism.

On reading this, I had one of my secretaries write to the Marx Institute in Moscow, asking if this assertion of the French writer is true.

I received a reply.

I like how Ian says it's giving Jordan Peterson if he wasn't a cunt.

One of the other things that I want to say about this text, and I brought this up in the Discord channels a little bit ago, is that this is an individualistic philosophy in this essay.

Camus isn't really taking his argument and pushing it toward a broader argument on how society should operate.

He's talking about the individual in this essay.

He's not discussing societal implications of the absurd.

He does that a bit more in his 1950-er essay, The Rebel.

But in this essay, it is individualistic.

And so there's points in this where... uh people would think that he's kind of getting hedonistic almost and like he's kind of and and it's kind of being like this is a bit narcissistic or egotistical or something like that it's um it's important to say that this is an individualistic essay it is not turning itself toward the broader implications of society it does that a little bit later on in the essay there are a couple of points that we will talk about where he brings that up but like The argument in the beginning here is much more about the individual and the individual's relationship with life and whether or not life is worth living.

There's actually a literary connection to that.

It's inspired by the book The Rebel by Albert Camus.

Brilliant one.

I fucking love that guy.

He's my hero.

So all of the lyrics are kind of inspired by the works of Camus in the sense of... literal rebellion, rebellion against the issues of our times, the injustices of our times, and God knows there's a lot of them to rebel against, but also the rebelling against the absurdism of the human condition.

That's why I love all that stuff.

So the song on the album called The Rebel, which is one of the more chilled ones, is more about rebelling against the enemy within, the internal demons that we have to wrestle with every day.