Not that I deem these short essays precious, but hey: some drops of life have been brewed in, so:
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[ or: ]

-best viewed listening to J.S.Bach, The Art Of Fugue, canon alla decima, contrapuncto alla terza
or to: J.S.Bach Organ Concert 2
or to: W.A. Mozart, divertissement KV 138
or, apparently so it said to me, to: The 7th violin concert of W.A. Mozart-

This essay is dedicated to John Doe, in the city of Bayonne, who someday in the early 1900 wanted to buy the Encyclopaedia Britannica by Henry Miller, as reported in Tropic of Capricorn. I wish I could have known more about you, mr. John Doe: you'd have proved a great teacher.

Order does is in the intentions of God, because the Heavens proclaim it: therefore upon entering here despair not of your eventual Harmony. With the help of one of His most mysterious Muses (because never you feel the harrowing grip of your futility and precariousness more than when you create; this is why Angels are in such a levity when they tread on earth and a feverish pallor engulfs their faces: because they tremble), I will deliver all that I hereby promise: what I shall start at the beginning, I will finish at the end. Fear not your shiver.
 

«No one takes a photo of something one wants to forget.»
[from the movie One Hour Photo - 2002, and with a great Robin Williams]

A few persons, whenever they read a critic of power, invariably seem to assume such a critic is implicitly meant to be addressed to, and strictly focused upon, the so called "western" model of society: this assumption has never been investigated enough but, left widely unexplored, has always been taken as granted.
To them what power is more hideous than the western one which never finds you guilty enough to be worth of being executed on the spot for what you are, for what you have done? Isn't that absolutely outrageous, a culprit let free to go away with his feeling of guilt?

«I suffered a pang of guilt whenever they bought me books or toys. This continued later on, when (...) I developed a strong dislike of the obviously rich; not because they could afford to buy things (envy plays a much smaller part in social conflict than is generally assumed) but because they could do so without a guilty conscience. Thus I projected a personal predicament onto the structure of society at large. (...)
We cast off our intellectual baggage like passengers on a ship seized by panic, until it became reduced to the strictly necessary minimum of stock-phrases, dialectical cliches and marxist quotations, which constitute the international jargon (...). To have shared the doubtful privilege of a bourgeois education, to be able to see several aspects of a problem and not only one, became a permanent cause of self reproach.»
[Arthur Koestler - from The God That Failed]

«My arguments were re-enforced by feelings of guilt and the suspicion that the side of me which pitied the victims of revolution secretly supported the ills of capitalism from which I myself benefited.»
[Stephen Spender - from The God That Failed]

You may believe that feeling guilty is the healthiest approach to correct one's life, but you're wrong: guilt is not a solution, guilt is exactly the hallmark of your impotence to devise the solution, and actually betrays an underlying adversion to give up narcissism; it is the recipe to fatal inaction. It's still your more primitive egoism in disguise.

This surreptitious assumption, namely that whatever author criticizes power is implicitly criticizing the western formulation of society, the western arrangement of economics, the western embodiments of authority, also derives from the attitude a few of these authors sport: Noam Chomsky naturally comes to the mind, for while he relentlessly releases into the capacious flow of the western markets the nearly 10 hard cover glittering pamphlets a year he sells to it in order to explain to it how perverse this market is, he is surely persuaded that he is criticizing the west indeed. And I do am inclined to agree completely with his analysis: a market that still publishes him is perverse, for a fundamentalist market would never survive such a contradiction as the one Chomsky personifies any time he cashes in from the market what he most despises of it and could give up with liberality: money. I believe that the only reason he has not fled yet the country that harasses and oppresses him so much, is that either he is kept locked in by the sadistic blackguards of the system or that he is aware we couldn't do without his masterpieces and inspired divinations - or because, of course, "the system is better fought from within", obviously as long as you don't publish online for free but for an editor who pays you.
But actually, he is not criticizing the west - no matter how strongly these authors or they readers may believe otherwise: they just trust the limits of their myopic compass, and wantonly exploit the analytical advantages that a system which doesn't punish them, lavishly allows them to use. Thanks to - but to whom?
 

Bread and Justice. Two petitioners seek justice in the hall of Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, Chairman of the Soviets. Moscow, 1929

We so gladly forget we do have an enormous deal of free thinkers who, regardless of their literary stature (and here Salman Rushdie naturally comes to the mind), in order to analyze power forcefully had to flee their own native countries indeed; an european capital, Paris, still to-day makes a conspicuous part of its literary reputation out of this phenomenon: for instance admittedly nearly 100% of the muslim authors who criticized power in their countries live now abroad, and not in China but either in Paris or London or New York.

«MS. STAHL: What I'm looking at is a poll (...), it's just about the United States and our friends. It is kind of -- it makes you feel terrible. India, Mexico. They have negative opinions about the United States.
SECRETARY POWELL: You tell me why that I have consular officers all over the world with visa lines going out in all direction -- people trying to come to America.»
[transcript source]

But if so, the critic of Power is a critic of Power as it is, regardless of where it is.

The fact we are misled into believing the Power we're talking about is a power pointedly concerned with its western formulations, depends on the reason that the west is the only one among such whereabouts where these analysis can be undertaken without importing capital punishment or legalized maiming, and without necessitating any escape to any further place -if any such eldorado would still be available at all- which would pay us instead of killing us for our ideas about Power.
Speaking of power within this Castle deludes us into believing we're summoning the lord of this Manor. But the features of power that we most despise cannot markedly dwell in the Castle where we can discuss them at our ease, but in a where which is mostly elsewhere, and where we could discuss them not lest arrest or execution. And the mere existence of such dramatic a difference (for what is more dramatic for a human being than losing life or liberty?) wipes out from the ground whatever relativism in powers: relativism cannot rest where all the room is filled by so pivotal a difference.

Not that our ideas necessarily have to be so revolutionary to deserve the keenest attention of the Police of the King.
But a few Governments are just touchy enough not to be upset by the thoughts, but by the mere act of thinking itself: in fact what is left there to mull about, if all is already arranged for the best, in the best of the possible worlds?
Are you possibly meaning you deem something is less than perfect in what The Fuhrer has graciously devised in his infinite wisdom for you and for your lovely family?

But his iron government is so weak and illegitimate that it has to fear to be shaken from its root even by the simplest thoughts of the simplest of its subjects.
That is how solid its foundations are: for if it weren't aware of being so weak, both Hitler and Stalin would have won, because they put to work for no salary at all more than one hundred million of persons each (and what is out there more convenient than the mass scale realization of this egotistical ideogram?), discarding the other millions they killed, just in order to fail as well:

«[They] would be kept in subjection by, among other devices, depriving them of education. As Hitler himself put it, they were to "know just enough to understand the road signs, so as not to get themselves run over by our vehicles: for them the word liberty must mean the right to wash on holidays".
(...) firms could survive only if at least three quarters of their output was for the Germans (...) deprived of any right to leisure (...) Any person resisting recruitment was likely to see his house burned down and his family seized as hostages and sent to a labour camp (...) would have no free time, would not be allowed to go to the cinemas, theatres or restaurants, and might only be absent from the house where they worked for three hours a week at the most.
(...) By the end of the war the age limit for labour recruitment in the east had been lowered to ten. (...) [As for the] concentration camps victims were unlimited and the Himmler-Thierarck agreement provided that 'antisocial' persons had to be worked to death.»
[Peter Calvocoressi, Second World War]

If Arthur Koestler "projected a personal predicament onto the structure of society", we claim back from the structure of society the very same predicament we have just projected unto it, and say: eureka, we have found it in the western society.

From then onward the box is successfully sealed, and we can finally deliver ourselves entirely to our expiatory abatement (and to smoking pot, which as everybody senses is a quintessentially remarkably revolutionary feat and accomplishment, surpassed only by crushing a window or, possibly, killing somebody to save the world we say we hate - and I do wish this all would have been the caricature it is not).

Alain Touraine, one among the most refined critics of modernity, wrote in 1992 (my translation):

«In this fashion, those who see in modernity but the triumph of an instrumental rationalism, are actually struggling against such an impoverished icon that they can gain no factual victory, and aren't but adorning with formulas the existing action of the real forces [in the battlefield].»

The potency of the deeds which have been performed and of the words which have been said: this will harangue and beleaguer us forever regardless of what we add. And what we add will soon be reduced but to the mere commentary which will better foil and celebrate the overwhelming threads performed by a superior destiny and by a more competent history which sweeps our illusions and misinterpretations with its might, and dilutes them in its omnivorous scope like a drop of tinging ink gets slowly but inexorably dispersed in the bowl of the oceans.

History has a logic of its own, which is so pertinent that it excavates so deep a groove that not even the most experienced of our stone carvers will ever be apt to compete with it.
Let the people of the ants keep shouting with Salinger «Rise high the roof beam, carpenters!»: they shout it in vain and in the wilderness, and their beam is to crumble any time, all the louder all the higher they raise it, for the battle the ants fight is a battle that was too often lost at the very same moment it got waged - so contradictory are the predicaments and the spells the we keep casting "onto the structure of society at large".

Once again the little men believed they understood it all, once again they thought they grasped the deep whirlwinds of the pattern, once again the exacted innocent victims in the name of a cherished mistake, and once again they set themselves up to lose the battle against the unvanquishable true.
Once again still today like yesterday "it is disheartening to inspire in a man the desire, and to take away from him the hope" [Seneca]; once again still today like yesterday "that from which you are running runs with you. Reform your own self. (...) that man is a weakling and a degenerate who struggles and maligns the order of the universe and would rather reform the gods than reform himself." [Seneca]; once again:

«Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt.
[Fate leads the willing, draws the unwilling]»
[Seneca, epistles]

Roy Lichtenstein, The Kiss, 1962

Modernity has defeated the legions.
Every new success that modernity attains, has a positive feedback on the previous ones, and reinforces their mark more deeply. Its enemies fight it for its very same glory.

If the mark was stressed with the defeat of nazism and fascisms, it gets so much more after the defeat of the communisms by the same actor, and the more it gets underscored the more we consider how the challenge these foes posed was a global and an all-out one, on all possible fronts, claiming each time the highest strain of all the resources and the toll of the most inhumane arson and destruction.
Therefore winning so much in these circumstances may not import a predicament about any absolute superiority of modernity, but certainly involves something pretty close to it. Winning so much against such formidable fiends means there is something inherently good and valid within the imperfections of the system that beats them. This is a fact, not a predicament.

It is not about saying that "vae victis" - that those who win are automatically right and to hell with all the losers. For these losers have not been enslaved, but have been elected to partake in the prosperity of the winners.
It is that it cannot be uniquely evil the system which won so much and achieved such remarkable results against these catastrophic enemies so openly, if not even avowedly, devoted to mischief.

A russian analyst, Timothy Gusinov, recently said while commenting contemporary history:

«During the Soviet-Afghan war, weapons so generously supplied by the United States and other countries to Afghan "freedom fighters" (who were, and still are, really fighting to preserve their feudal past) often found their way to the black market through the mujahideen training and supply centers in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province.»
[source]

This is a remarkable statement indeed.
Of course, that a russian trades blame with Afghans about "really fighting to preserve their feudal past" may sound weird, for USSR undoubtedly was a feudal superpower, committed to the most traditional feudal warfare: standing army, land conquering, land coveting, and endorsing fundamentally anti-industrial chances: as also Ralf Dharendorf points out modernity means "citizenship as an instantaneous enabling to the whole entitlement set of a society" so that social positions are no longer permanently preassigned by the status but are scalable by that personal effort called work.
And the USSR has always been a declared adversary of this implicitly free-market oriented arrangement, and the one class society isn't but the same as a caste society: where you are there you will always be, and your cradle isn't but the socket of your very same grave: "Abandon every hope you who enter here" [Dante Alighieri].

Eugene Delacroix, Liberty leads the people, 1830 (part.)

None the less, that sentence is remarkable for it focuses the issue in a self evident manner: some don't fight for the future but for the past; some don't fight for more civilization, but for less; not for the wealth but for the plough and the sickle and the ox; not for a vision, but for a stagnation and for endlessly doldrums; some don't fight for their rights, but for the privileges of the very few (and not at all the brightest and the best, for they have all already been executed) upon the crowd of the miserable and of the destitute; some don't fight for progress but for regress; don't fight for independence but for the perpetuation of slavery (there were two sides in the american civil war); some don't fight for women and children, but for a social settlement where women are household slaves and children aren't but the automats meant to be crushed under the iron heel of a narrow-minded set of patriarchic rules that have to be instilled into them in order to grant their perpetuation. Some don't fight for commonwealth, but for the prolongation of a subsistence economy that not only wants no more, but openly pleases itself into declaring that revelling into this infirmity and ignorance is precisely what it most relishes.

Upon leaving it there undisturbed, you may find as I wrote elsewhere that the problem is: if modernity leaves regressive societies alone, would regressive societies leave modernity alone?
And if regressive social arrangements leave modernity alone, would they be so kind not to set up another little world war of their own?

«I rebel, therefore we are.»
[by a fantastic Albert Camus]

Guerrilla is exalted by those who are left with their defeat.
Guerrilla means to be avowed to be unsuccessful, insofar as it requires so much time to achieve so little, that if it would ever come to a close, it exacted so many sufferings, it drained so many energies, it imposed so many unbearable sacrifices to a population, to render this population traumatized forever. So prolonged is the wearing down, that whenever it would ever end successfully, it would be left to reign upon a realm of debris.

Guerrilla is in the line of safeguard and of resistance.
Safeguard has no object: safeguard declares itself as a method without purpose, for all that it safeguards is approved unconditionally, independently of its nature.
Whenever you give priority to safeguard, you wipe out all the subordinates. If you are for the priority of the safeguard as a value in itself, you've cancelled whatever alternative axiology [*]: safeguard excludes all the competitors by definition.
Being for the safeguard means: I have no idea for I refute entertaining any. Safeguard is a declaration of unfitness, that mistakes its own impotencies with the features of a choice.
Safeguard is a noun that can be interchanged with one of its synonyms: surveillance. The difference is that surveillance is more elusive whereas a safeguard is more confident and staunch about its idea that it cannot be really challenged
If I wage surveillance, I thereby declare I find my principles questionable, but if I safeguard I basically deem my tenets unbreakable. Safeguard is a foppish surveillance, it doesn't deem that its acquisitions are premature, but finds them definitive.
It doesn't deem that its achievements are in need of being consolidated, but that they're unshakable by default: it relies upon the alleged sacrament of an irrefutable tradition, inconfutable because inconfuted, inconfuted because inconfutable.

Resistance is in the same lot: resistance is a confession of impotence, for it implies the constantly underlying acknowledgement of the substantial permanence of the defeat. By electing resistance as a model of opposition, you have taken in, in bundle with, it the admission you vowed yourself to dilatory tactics.
When a policy consists in resisting, it merely dissimulates a policy of defeat.
In fact, you do not have to oppose problems with an infinite resistance, but with an encompassing strategy. You don't have to face problems with a resistance, but with a solution.
As Stephen Sloan wrote (apparently quoting some Bruce D. Berkowitz and Allan E. Goodman):

«What must be done is what is important, not what is urgent.»

It is the same with things like the italian risorgimento: it eventually led to independence but left unsolved so many problems that fascism was in the corner nearby.
Every time you see the prefix 're' you have to suspect there is something wrong.
This prefix is not like in re-volution which means a complete round of an orbit, namely the competent fulfillment of a cycle, sort of a "consummatum est". This prefix is in many occasions just a hint to the fact something is re-starting not because it has successfully completed a stage, but because it either aborted or failed, and thus has to start anew.
In such case, you are not to be surprised if I reveal to you that the very same causes that made it abort or fail once may be all but dealt with, and being still in action are still suitable to bring about, once again, the same defeat by the same reasons that have never really been emended.

Too many times men, by revisiting a set of bad premises, mean nothing else but devising a comely justification to cover up their own failures to their own eyes, to dismiss their own responsibilities from their own hands and shoulders: we just want to be reassured that our own errors weren't such, that we were basically right in our misapprehensions, and we make sure we usher ourselves into the same defeat - twice: "I had to learn many sad things in my life, so it was strange when I saw that I had to learn them twice", once Ernest Hemingway wrote.

«Those who have been excluded by the never ceasing movement of the innovations and from the decision making, do not base themselves any longer upon a class conception (...) they no longer define themselves on the basis of what they do, but on the basis of what they don't do: they define themselves through unemployment and marginality (...) Youth movements (...) have caused grave incidents, looting commercial malls or setting cars ablaze, at times taking as occasion the accidental death of one of them by some brutal intervention of the police. These have no hope of social integration, but are enlivened by a pointless rage that trascends this integration which is by then more impossible than unwanted.»
[Alain Touraine]

An August Sander photo, 1930

pierced rebellion? Photo by Desmond Morris's People Watching

They don't fight against what they cannot have and maybe long for, but they are enraged at themselves - and not at anybody else: otherwise there is no other chance to get persuaded in good faith that a nuisance like a Mc Donald's is an offence, that it's the enemy, or nothing less than the symbol of a cosmogonic, cosmodaemonic evil. Any adult person would recoil from such self delusion.
And since they are in no connection with the real roots of their anger, they are doomed to failure since inception.
In fact what's the point with proving a wrong theory right? Who's gonna benefit from it?

These men are not unlike those traits they despise in power, on the contrary they are copycats of the deformed power they imagine in their sound and fury.
Society, this universal alibi, didn't coherce them: if not in the realm of the most viable among the very convenient of the excuses, or in those of the fairy tales where the cynderella who is unable to work on herself would become an outstanding wit if only the Prince would have lent her a different pair of shoes.
If you don't find margins for self improvement after all the plentiful of blood that has been spilled in the last centuries to grant you these margins in a reasonable way at least within a few countries, then it means you're worthless and your potential virtues are potential only insofar they don't exists: for only an Eldorado of perfections and creeks of flowing milk seemingly depict the place where your perfections, so frail, would blossom - and you're the only one who keeps believing this.
I don't mean we cannot improve: I mean there is nothing that justifies such a list of doleances and such magniloquent nihilism.

Some powers, like those based on ethnic grounds, are in a permanent need of being strengthened, and are never satisfied with the current support they have (thence those fake elections won with 99.98% of the votes): like the conception of race, they can subsist only as long as they reassure themselves that they are, and go on deeming themselves as, permanently challenged, permanently jeopardized by the pollution of their alleged purity. They cannot subsist if they are not continuously imperiled.
They therefore cultivate the culture of an everlasting emergency, of a permanent mobilisation, which of course isn't but a measure of how much contradictory their theories are: those who survive only in the conditions that challenge their survival cannot complain but with themselves when they perish.

So not only the vested powers can perceive themselves as perpetually endangered, but also the "rebels" can partake in the same paranoiac scheme indeed, and don the same robe: aren't these rebels perennially marshalled against an unceasing abuse plaguing them?
This is why I repeatedly stated that I find our current so called no global movements but mere connivances of the most regressive outlines of power. They are basically fascist forces, for they share the very same models shapes and practices: they fight those outlines of power they see or cast on the outside hoping that by coping with them, they would one day stop feeling the grips of those very same outlines they host inside.

Not that I don't like rebels.
On the contrary I do personally believe that a man who has never been a rebel should never be allowed to govern.
"No one governs with impunity" wrote Saint Just. But those who cannot comprehend the reasons of the revolt are those who cannot comprehend the principles of good government too, and would appreciate only repression: and this goes beyond the impunity issue. You cannot exist as an individual if you have not firstly and fiercely fought against roles. You have to die as your own social and anti-social masks to be born as a whole individual. And if you fail, be virile enough: either insist struggling with yourself or finally perish; for you'd any way.

«to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapared with stars and trailing comets. To be of night, so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. (...) To be englobed and encompassed and to encompass and to englobe at the same time. No more pity, no more tenderness. To be human only terrestrially, like a plant or a worm or a brook. To be decomposed, disvested of light and stone, variable as the molecule, durable as the atom, heartless as the earth itself.»
[Henry Miller]

The appeal to be yourself is vain if it never echoes within the walls of the bastille and makes them feel as the enemy they are. A man who cannot love rebellion and doesn't know how to talk with it, is a man who will never be a good politician. But the man that in order to ape rebellion feels the compulsory need to rebel against whatever, is not a rebel.
It was said that when you speak to God, that is praying; when God speaks to you, that is patent schizophrenia; so when you rebel against a real foe, that is courage, but when you insist rebelling against an imagined evil, that is patent neurosis.

Many rebels too often fight for their feudal past, and while they do this they wear a promethean mask that doesn't become their vileness and fundamental ignorance; so that every time they embellish themselves uttering a slogan of virtue, they just make virtue resound as a curse when pronounced by such mouths.

You can be a tyrant, a negotiator, or a rebel: but in many cases it is still the same person by different names.
Those who always prefer to negotiate do this because they know they have to sell a compromised merchandise. Those who do not negotiate at all but impose, do it after the very same motif: they know they cannot market the rotten item otherwise. The only difference is a difference in attitudes: the former is flattering, the latter is impudent, but they are both fully aware of the not actionable nature of the product they try to place.
So are these rebels: reactionary, ultraconservative forces that fully play in the hands of a regression into a feudal past which couldn't be sold, not even to themselves, with slogans different by the ones they cry.

I was a few days ago reading a book on Mathematics: something I don't do often, but it's good to keep in touch with Mathematics too from time to time. The book was showing a cartesian cross: you know, the cross with the origin in zero and the four linear branches with positive and negative numbers, vertical and horizontal...
There was a point moving in the lot, and the book was tracing its coordinates casting its projections on the axis.
All of a sudden I remembered a book on non-euclidean physics I also read a few months ago, whose basic idea was that what shapes relativism and quantic approaches is that any coordinate just depends upon the observer, and not upon the system; and I wondered: so here we have the point, which is an observer, and there we have the cartesian cross, which can embody the "system".
What the point and the system might reciprocally believe if they were thinking entities?
There were apparently four and only four possible chances:

1. The system believes he is dominating (leading the game)
2. The point believes he is dominating (leading the game)
3. The system believes it is dominated, determined, and oppressed by the point (believes the point leads the game)
4. The point believes it is dominated, driven, and oppressed by the System (believes the System leads the game)

Now what's characteristic with these affirmations?
That they are all true. All are true perspectives.
But they also are all conflicting with each other.
Therefore, since they are all conflicting, they are all false too.
And if they are so, they are true and false at the same time, and their result is undefined, therefore they yield false, for this is the outcome on the whole when a whole set of statements conflicting with each other are true: the whole is invalidated and collapses.
So the whole set is false.

None the less, I thought, it appeared possibily true for the actors, if analyzed step by step: all those falsehoods had a potentiality of truth for you couldn't rule out the chance each of those versions could have been, or could be, the true one.
So it contained something true, or I could have not acknowledged something true in it at first light.
Therefore the question was: how can I sift the true from the false in order to bring the set back to a true condition instead of letting it yield a false outcome?
There must be something true in it. None the less it relinquished false.
So, why not attempting a criss crossing: when an equation whose values are true cannot yield a true solution, the reason is that its components have been arranged in the wrong order.
Therefore if we swap A with C and B with D we'd get the truth.

Let's try.
The outcome was:
A/C) system : the system is oppressing and dominating (or leading) me.
B/D) point: the point is dominating and oppressing (or leading) me.

Puzzling, isn't it? None the less, that must be the true combination of the terms. Full independence matches full responsibility.

So why not, for one time, give it a try and attempt an option we never gave a try to?
We are finally casting our own destinies with our own hands and, believe me, there is no global spectre or power out there oppressing you in the west and taking any special care of you; and whenever there would really be an oppressive autocracy, which could occur only after many years of mismanagements of our private lives and of misunderstandings in our private minds held like truth we firmly believed in, and therefore we would eventually allow evil to seize power, you and me will immediately realize the dictatorship is there, and we'll understand it without any controversy among us: because we'll recognize it from the facts, for neither me nor you will be either writing or reading or disputing here any longer about how unfair the system would have been.

«What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind. If a man speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering follows him as a wheel of the cart follows the beasts that draw the cart. (...) He insulted me he hurt me he defeated me, he robbed me: those who think so will not be free from hate (...) A man may find pleasure in evil as long as his evil has not given fruit; but when the fruit of evil comes then that man finds evil indeed. A man may find pain in doing good as long as his good has not given fruit; but when the fruit of good comes then that man finds good indeed.»
[The Dhammapada]

A 1994 and by now obscure even to myself scratch I scribbled on an empty page of a Paul K. Feyerabend book

M.C. Escher: La mezquita - 1936

The objective is clarified as far as it is cleansed of the subjective, and the subjective can be sure it is knowing itself as long as such knowledge relinquishes objective evidences: otherwise, it's all just arbitrariness.

The subjective hasn't to immolate itself upon the altar of objectivity to attain a degree of superiority, although this is normally assumed. But the fact that the subjective apparently sets itself against objectivity is not an evil in itself.
Subjectivity, by swimming against reason, inflicts a vulnus, a wound to the same objectivity which reason predicates; but insofar as it is a wound, it attains depth by wounding, and becomes surgery.

This art, the art of knowing, this gnoseology [*] that wrangles and combats between objectivity and subjectivity, is an art that is honed in the process: for a surgeon cannot be improvised, and the symbolic skillfulness of the surgeon represents exactly, in its symbolic domain, the capability to discriminate between the objective and the subjective, between inference and observation, and to draw a clear cut among them.
The more I can recognize my subjective inference within objectivity, the more I can grasp the real objectivity by stripping it of such interferences; and the more I can infer my subjectivity by the perturbations it inflicts on objectivity, the more I'm knowing myself for what subjectively, and no longer objectively, I am as a living soul.
«For an individual isn't a subjectivity but because he masters his own work, which withstands him» [Alain Touraine].

We could even say that "depth" is a synonymous for the amount of the achieved power of discrimination between the subjective and the objective, whose crests interweave and interferes like wave lengths and phases.
Objectivity holds no preeminence in this process, and subjectivity neither.
My subjectivity must become clearer to myself in all its specificities, and eventually re-organize itself upon the basis of these gradual awarenesses gained by a constant confrontation and re-elaboration of all the objectivities I can confront myself with: so that I can finally spot that neither a supreme subjectivity exists by which I could have been allowed to rage around with my folly, nor a crushing objectivity exists, for the same subjective force that distorts it, is the force that can redeem it too. They're just the same thing, facing each other at the mirror.
Symmetrical reflections, orthogonal transpositions are enacted:

«via a kind of vortex whereby patterns in a brain mirror the brain's mirroring of the world, and eventually mirror themselves, whereupon the vortex of "I" becomes [one] real, causal entity. For an imperfect but vivid concrete analogue to this curious abstract phenomenon, think of what happens when a TV camera is pointed at [the very same] TV screen so as to display the screen on itself, and that screen on itself - what in Godel Escher Bach I called a (...) level crossing feedback loop.»
[Douglas R. Hofstadter]

The issue of subjectivity vs objectivity leads us towards the theme of objectivity vs personal interest.
In fact there is one golden avenue to mystify a situation, and this is of being compromised with it. Of course, this occurs only when a self interest is involved in the matter.
But one's own interests are always and invariably suitable to be called in, therefore either we abdicate to objectivity, or we abandon ourselves to the myopia that our interests impose upon us - often just in order to lose all we have with the intention to preserve it.
There are two ways to uphold objectiveness: either you have no interests concerned with the situation, or if you have some you do not reason as if you have them, namely you refute using those interests as a guideline to interpret and understand reality.
Objectivity is either achieved by disengagement or by noblesse.
For being aristocratic, a la Nietzsche, doesn't mean being far away from the mob, but from that plebeian attitude which says that our interest counts more than all the rest and we cannot differentiate ourselves from it.
Avoiding this proximity means being aristocratic, in a sense which is not reactionary: it means being "Lords" in a way close to the one meant by Nietzsche: "being aristocratic means interposing distance" - I just specified distance among what.

And there can be no social liberation if before we don't fully succeed at an individual liberation; you won't win together what you were uncapable of fighting alone: the army of the frightened men doesn't become less of a quixotic army because it parties.
This is why Freud has to be preferred to any Marx: because before liberating myself from the exogenous deception, I want firstly to get rid of the endogenous self deception. Only on these basis I feel as much safe as an earthly life can be.
This sour truth has not made of Freud the supporter of the "bourgeois" order, but on the contrary made of him he who more dangerously unhinged all its hypocritical dissimulations - and as long as we indulge into our endogenous deceits and frauds denying them so willingly while we so promptly never deny the occurrence of any alleged exogenous attack, we are the ones who are still fully within this hypocritical "bourgeois" order we predicate against Freud, no matter whether this deceit smells another reek:

«But none of this will help the writer as a writer unless he finds something new to add to human knowledge while he is writing. Otherwise he will stink like any other writer when they bury him; except, since he has had political affiliations, they will send more flowers at the time and later he will stink a little more.»
[Ernest Hemingway, By Line, Old Newsman Writes]

Of course we may dislike all these outcomes. We may just prefer assuming we're being objectively insulted from above or from outside even where we clearly are not.
But:

«Things are never either so much painful or so much arduous in themselves: but it is our own weakness and sapless mind that makes them such. To judge great things it needs a great soul, or we're to ascribe to it the defect which is in us. A straight oar appears distorted in the murky waters. It doesn't just matter that the thing can be seen, but how it is seen. (...) No one is in distress for a very long time but because of his own fault.
As for those who have no heart to endure either life or death, as for those who neither want to fight nor to flee, what can we do with them?»
[Michel de Montaigne, Essays]

I think that personal resentments are bad advisers, and should never lead us into our conclusions, also because many times if we let 'them' doing such a thing, we end up blaming all the wrong persons in order to avoid blaming the only one(s) that should be blamed.
Personal resentment doesn't do any good. And although I myself have no clue about what is civilized and what is not, I have no doubt about what makes a strong person and what makes a weak one: being able to tolerate some pain without exploding immediately is a requisite that life demands.
I don't say much pain. But if we cannot tolerate a few of the strings and of the arrows that life throws and hurls at us, we will be forever at odds, wherever we live, wherever we go, whoever we meet, whatever government we had the good or bad luck to live under.

There have been a great deal of debates on what distinguishes the current generations from the past ones: I don't find their traits more menacing than those that led past generations into Hitler's arms or into Pol Pot's embrace. I can at most find them not at all much different, and certainly less aware of the wealth that they enjoy: because, having savoured affluence and liberty since their birth, as an heredity bequeathed by those who suffered fought and died for it, they do believe it's all for granted and obvious and -perhaps- that the stork brought it.

But if there is a trait I do see in the younger generation that I think was not present in the older ones, it is this one: the younger generations are nearly completely unable to tolerate (let alone spotting its formative value) even one milligram of grief without promptly erupting into an astounding hysteria. They don't know how to suffer constructively.
Take away from them their somewhat fashionable sneakers or their xerographic "Che Guevara" T-shirt, and you'll see what ensues - of course in the name of the no logo ideology...

Too many times, being unaccustomed to tolerate the smaller degree of difficulty, we believe that our own problems are bigger than they are, and that the whole of the world should be enrolled to solve them at once.

Of course, if we can't detach ourselves from our own daily problems, there is no invisible hand that can do it on our behalf. Though I am the first to acknowledge a person can find difficult to set a distance from big problems - at least I had my onw share of problems doing that.
But we should find no difficulty with smaller things, instead of overrating them systematically: in fact, when was it the last time that your problem was less than the most dramatic possible and the most engrossing one?
If we can see they're just the trifle of life and as such will always be with us, we'd have done a remarkable step forward; for our lives are small and their problems cannot be always much bigger than what their size is. Are we up to our problems?
Not life, only death knows how to be always majestic.

«One dignity delays for all
One mitred afternoon -
None can avoid this purple-
None evade[s] this Crown.

Coach, it insures, and footmen.
Chamber, and state, and throng.
Bells, also, in the village
As we ride grand along!

What dignified Attendants!
What service when we pause!
How loyally at parting
Their hundred hats they raise!

How pomp surpassing ermine
When simple You, and I,
Present our meek escutcheon
And claim the rank to die!»
[Emily Dickinson]

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MYSTERIOUS SIGNALS FROM THE SELF

Alternative perspectives

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POETICS FOR THE NEW AGE

A poetic for the drama - in the new century

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THE SEER COMETH THROUGH A LEE SMOLIN'S TUNNEL

Clairvoyance is the future: about a new way to knowledge

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