The nobility of the minority requires the mediocrity of the majority; without “last man,” there would be no “Übermensch.”
The nobility of the minority requires the mediocrity of the majority; without “last man,” there would be no “Übermensch.”
― Atrona Grizel
I do not think; I transform my emotions into thoughts.
― Atrona Grizel
Psychoanalysis is turned upside down in the modern world, because the unease at the center of contemporary life no longer arises from repression, but from a pressure born of the visible absence of repression itself. People forgot the value of privacy. Everything lies exposed: thoughts, words, bodies. Everything is transparent, and this means identity itself becomes transparent as well, because people define themselves not inwardly but outwardly, rendering themselves dependent on society. From this emerges a culture of conformity among them. Within such an environment, a person forgets how to govern themselves and begins to react automatically, always at a low level of attention—because sustaining such constant activity means refraining from intensity itself. Thus, they become deprived of an inner identity. They no longer carry conscious awareness. They become pure social animals. Since the pressure imposed upon them is not to remain silent but to communicate incessantly, they transform society into a deafening echo chamber where they hear only their own voices. This prevents the formation of a rigid or coherent identity, because narcissism is not, in essence, an excess of identity, but its absence. That is why, when they suffer, they feel as though they are “drifting.” And even though standing upon solid ground may be more painful, it is still less dizzying than endlessly floating.
― Atrona Grizel
A happy person is someone who remains happy even without happiness.
― Atrona Grizel
The more correct everything appears in a society, the more deeply everything is wrong.
― Atrona Grizel
The “leaders” of friend groups remind me of tribal chiefs from primitive times. They, too, gathered in groups in order to survive by hunting on the savanna; these groups were called tribes, and they raided other tribes to plunder them and increase their own pleasure. Modern friendships, shaped by the influence of DNA that still believes it is living on the savanna, strike me as built upon the same tribal logic. Consequently, those who are considered “charismatic” do not appear charismatic to me; they appear merely the most animalistic, the purest expression of the Will.
― Atrona Grizel
There are too many people around me whose entire bodies would be crushed beneath the weight of my brain.
― Atrona Grizel
What parents who send their children to mainstream private schools fail to see—or choose to ignore—is that money cannot buy a soul and therefore cannot provide one. These schools resemble commercial enterprises fused with farms populated by every variety of herd animal far more than they resemble disciplined academies. As a result, their primary focus and purpose are economic rather than intellectual. What they systematically manufacture are not original minds capable of critical thought, but individuals who think very little, accumulate an assortment of ornate certificates, and present themselves as “thinkers.” Along the way, each student is directly or indirectly indoctrinated with liberal-democratic values, producing individuals who are excessively social, extroverted, materialistic, hedonistic, and superficial. Their inner worlds are neglected and crushed beneath the pressures of success and performance, and so they never develop into mentally mature adults. In the most honest terms, these institutions are capitalist factories designed to produce perfectly conformist consumers for economic profit: asleep and content with it, since, on paper, the money they paid allows them to appear as geniuses.
― Atrona Grizel
While walking down the street, I constantly restrain myself from asking random people, “How are you? Do you feel well? Are you satisfied with this world?” and even from embracing them. Yes, me. I live in such a repulsive world that if I did this, especially in cities where nobody cares about anyone beyond mocking and condemning them, the reaction I would receive would be that I am “childish,” “unable to become an adult.” Everyone passes by in the streets, and meanwhile I suffer from the scarcity of finding someone who would sit down amid all this chaos and take pleasure in speaking about it with me, because they do not even notice the chaos at all. Even from this, one can understand how adulthood is defined by society: learning social indifference. I must state plainly that I never learned it. Yet living in a world where this lesson has been mastered so thoroughly erodes my humanity, and I am constantly trying to suppress my excessive concern for other people. For example, I try not to look at them. I avoid speaking to them. I refuse to do kindnesses for them. But in the background, I am always thinking about them, always wondering about their lives, always secretly clinging to despair despite all my disbelief in revolution, imagining that this entire order could be destroyed if all of us came together. In such a condition, my self-expression occurs entirely through indirect means. For it to be noticed, someone attentive to details would be necessary, and liberal democracy, in its state of perpetual motion, has annihilated attention to detail. This means that while I secretly feed pigeons, hold butterflies on my fingers, and stroke cats, I still cannot renounce my humanity, despite my outward appearance seeming entirely inhuman to others, within this bureaucracy carefully designed to destroy that humanity and even make me ashamed of it. Much like Rosa Luxemburg writing from prison a letter about a butterfly, I too cling to the smallest details in order to affirm my humanity. If people were able to see it, they would persecute me, and they would take those insects and animals from my hands while I was happy with them, because they would not want me to remain human, and so they would want me to give up showing love. That is why I sent love underground. I did not destroy it. I mean only that everything must now happen out of sight.
― Atrona Grizel
Anyone who cannot understand how someone like Emil Cioran could once have felt sympathy for Nazism cannot understand the archetype of the alienated intellectual either. It is not ideology that attracts people like this. I do not even think Cioran cared about getting rid of Jews and communists, about committing genocide against millions, or about building concentration and labor camps. What drew him to Nazism was a specific aspect of it: its ruthless aesthetics. What he did was cling to whatever he could find while drowning in the swamp of hollowed-out liberal modernity and bourgeois emptiness. Because I know from myself that this extreme superficiality and decadence of society sometimes drives me so mad that I begin to feel the need for something to shake it awake and set it right, without caring whether that force shakes it so violently that it kills it in the process, because all I can think about is getting rid of this society sunk in madness. Indeed: in societies where dysfunction and disorder reigns, it is not the extremists but the moderates who are insane, because the actual pathology is to conform to this social conformism.
― Atrona Grizel
The fact that students raised in a culture of comfort, supposedly “animal-loving” yet in reality spending their entire lives merely liking cat and dog videos on social media, a culture fundamentally infantile but presented as “cuteness,” could sit through a history lesson listening to the foundation, dictators, structure, functioning, and collapse of the Roman Empire and still ask the teacher, as the only thing that interests them, “Did Caesar ever see a panda?”...
― Atrona Grizel
The architecture of average social spaces plays a significant role in why they are so noisy. It seems to me that in environments that evoke filth, grayness, and misery—or, conversely, excessive beauty, excessive happiness, and exaggerated positivity—only the most disciplined monks could remain unaffected. This means that those who inhabit such places—or rather, who are confined there, since people rarely choose to remain in these environments for long periods of time of their own free will—push the surroundings into the background by surrendering themselves to noise. Conversations, jokes, and games allow individuals to forget their surroundings, because the surroundings themselves are oppressive. They are likely either excessively distracting in the manner of capitalist advertising, with signs, billboards, and lights everywhere, or excessively tasteless in the manner of capitalist ruthlessness, consisting of nothing more than flat concrete walls. Workplaces, for example, are bureaucratic because bureaucracy demands movement, speed, and performance. Being in an environment of concrete walls and fluorescent lights, reminiscent of a hospital or prison, can orient the mind in such a way that one begins to magnify the importance of one's work—even if one is drowning in absurd office paperwork and forced to memorize the faces of grim, gossiping people simply because they are one's colleagues. By contrast, anyone who enters a cathedral or a temple immediately understands why the atmosphere feels so different. There is an absolute religiosity there; no trace remains of bureaucracy, action, or noise. Inside a Gothic church, I cannot imagine harming myself because I received poor grades on exams. Likewise, in a Buddhist monastery, when a lover leaves me, I would not commit the foolishness of blaming myself rather than recognizing the event as a play of biological impulses. Yet the truth is that, especially in cities, people do not live in such places. Instead, they dwell in tasteless, carelessly constructed concrete prisons, meticulously designed to erode the soul and adapt the individual to the social system. In such an environment, it becomes a necessity for people to keep themselves constantly distracted—in other words, to turn cities into nests of noise—in order to survive.
― Atrona Grizel