Libertarianism controls society by not controlling it.
Libertarianism controls society by not controlling it.
― Atrona Grizel
To be able to have sex, one must not know pornography.
― Atrona Grizel
On special occasions, for example, birthdays, things like buying material items or sending money to a person are not really ‘"gifts"; they are direct reflections of materialistic values, and rather than elevating a person, they turn them into an object. I remember that my birthdays consisted of fancy decorations, cakes with candles, and a stack of paper money from relatives whose names I can’t even recall, all because of my family’s excessive fixation. No one even stops and asks, "How are you?" Everyone has become automated. A day comes, and immediately they buy a cake and place money in front of me. Is this how they express my worth to me? This perspective, however, is cultural, and it reflects the emptiness of a society whose spirit has been drained. If society were truly full, even a single hug could be the best birthday gift, and there would be no need for all those decorations, cakes, and money, that is, for the entirely material dimension of it all. If a civilization desperately needs such things in order to "properly celebrate," it should be understood that no humanity remains there.
― Atrona Grizel
While others experience loneliness as an unpleasant condition arising from a person’s “inability” to form social skills, I see sociality itself as a mechanism that suppresses this unpleasant reality—that is, the feeling of loneliness, which is the default truth of the human condition—and distracts the individual from it. Because a person who is not lonely is, in a sense, a liar; estranged from themselves. Everyone is born alone and dies alone. Even God, if such a being exists, is utterly alone. And perhaps the universe was created not to escape this loneliness, but to share it. Accordingly, all existence bears this loneliness like a stain upon it.
― Atrona Grizel
Knowledge does not trigger thought; on the contrary, it often hinders it. Because a knowledgeable person uses what already exists, and since this is an automatic behavior, it does not involve reflection. This means that the more knowledgeable or “skilled” a mind is, the more unconscious it becomes in a sense. Because everything that is learned becomes automated, and this means the narrowing of the field of thought.
― Atrona Grizel
The way to solve depression is not to be optimistic or happy, but simply to regain the ability to perceive things that exist outside oneself. Or, in its most effective sense… to fall in love with a woman, a man, a plant, a tree, a cat, or a bird. For, as Byung-Chul Han also says: the cause of depression is not self-hatred but the loss of the self as a result of excessive fixation on the self—that is, a kind of excessive self-admiration, or in psychiatric terminology, a state of complete narcissism.
― Atrona Grizel
The masses who chase after charlatans called influencers read and absorb the poison they scatter around in the form of videos and texts, and then begin to evaluate themselves accordingly, as if these people were prophets, simply because of their fame. If all celebrities say the same thing, and if what a person values is fame, then this will lead them to lose their sense of self-worth if they do not do what those celebrities do. And what celebrities promote is, of course, extreme positivity: one must never suffer, must soothe even the slightest unhappiness, must always go to parties and dinners to distract oneself, must know how to indulge oneself through shopping, and all sorts of other nonsense. When I see this, celebrities seem to me almost like social engineering agents secretly hired by governments to increase demand in their economies—but of course the ordinary majority does not see the mechanism behind it, only the surface, and so they take these things into their minds as if they were genuinely insightful ideas. Yet what they take in are parasites, and those parasites will slowly consume their thoughts. In the end: someone who is completely unaware of the internet would never say that their “brain is broken,” because even that way of speaking belongs to trend-dominated internet culture.
― Atrona Grizel
On social media, the content page is rearranged according to what I consume, and whichever topics I engage with eventually become the only things I encounter. This creates a kind of virtual echo chamber. For example, if I watch history videos, I know that in the end my homepage on that platform will show me nothing but history videos. This is actually a result of a toxically positive liberal culture that insists “everything should be the way I want it; everything should suit me and make me comfortable,” because in this way consumerism is increased. What is overlooked is that by appealing only to a person’s areas of interest, that person’s field of vision is narrowed. Today, people even judge and like or dislike each other based largely on what appears on these homepages, because the homepage has come to represent a person’s life. Yet it does not even represent a person’s life; it merely presents a version of a life based on the data it receives, and does not reflect the person’s true essence. Ultimately, someone exposed only to a social media feed shaped by algorithmic recommendations develops a narrower worldview and begins to radicalize, which makes them turn into a liberal egoist, and this is already one of the factors that leads to social indifference.
― Atrona Grizel
Modern life replaces symbols and values with excitement and tension, and even the greater popularity of horror or war films and movies compared to philosophical or ritualistic ones stems from this. Because modern life has no meaning; meaning comes only through values and symbols, and since these have disappeared, people live inwardly in a void of meaning and thus become perpetually driven to seek excitement and tension. In other words, they strip the world of intellectuality and piety and render it entirely sensory and emotional. This is why, no matter how “full” modern life may seem, it ultimately makes one feel empty enough to become dependent on that very “fullness,” because those who truly possess a rich inner life do not even feel the need to experience “intense” things.
― Atrona Grizel
To see everyday life not as natural but as entirely unnatural is to put even the smallest details that everyone lives through on trial as if they were existential crimes, and by passing judgment on them, to declare even the most innocent as the most hardened criminals.
― Atrona Grizel
Responding to desires will ultimately lead to unhappiness, but not responding to them will not necessarily lead to unhappiness.
― Atrona Grizel
My eyes remain fixed on distant places. Faraway landscapes. Mountains. Seas. I am always watching the horizon. Because I always love what is unattainable. And if I were where that horizon lies, I would gaze at a new horizon in the same way from there, because I do not love arriving; I love longing, even for something whose very existence is uncertain.
― Atrona Grizel
Modernity has reshaped friendships entirely around the satisfaction of individual desires, corrupting them and even importing capitalism into this domain. To see this, it is enough to enter any online dating site: people are divided into categories—blonde, Black, tall, short, overweight, thin, introverted, extroverted, music enthusiast, animal lover, etc. They resemble labels affixed to products, and when one compares this scene to market shelves, the similarity becomes striking. These people have become like the items on those shelves, through the labels attached to them and the platforms that display them. This means that liberalism and the digital world have turned even relationships into marketplaces, reducing them to the pursuit of satisfaction. Just as a consumer does not buy what they do not like, a person will automatically ignore someone they do not like, simply because they are different, as tolerance for difference has eroded. This is because the central value of liberalism is “individual rights,” which can also be translated as “everything existing according to the individual’s preferences.” The toxic side of this distorted fetishization of happiness is that it leads mostly to narcissism. For if the world always conforms to one’s desires, the field of perception gradually narrows: the individual is indulged, taught that everything they want can be obtained, and thus made to move endlessly between options. There is also a paradox of such freedom: it includes the ability to abandon choices altogether and, consequently, to jump restlessly from one person to another in search of satisfaction—because one is, in truth, never satisfied, no matter how many “soulmates” dating sites present. In this condition, perpetual consumption emerges; relationships themselves become commercialized and thus, in a sense, economic, leading to a constant sociability. In virtual shopping, a person researches websites and purchases products. Online dating sites, in much the same way, essentially mean that a person researches these platforms to “buy people.” For the constant sociability of the modern world is, at its core, nothing more than the endless consumption of people.
― Atrona Grizel
I imagine a partner. If they are “human,” meaning still within the social world, then while I am dissolving existence and tearing philosophers apart in my writings, they can pay the rent of the house and clean my room. Like a kind of servant. Of course, this would be very useful to me, because what would most stimulate my world of thought is that they would free me from the hollow burdens of the ordinary social world, thus opening empty space in my mind. But if this person is, like me, alienated and isolated to the point of seeing humans as aliens, and if their primary domain of existence is abstract rather than physical, then the two of us might spend our time dismantling all the scientists, writers, poets, thinkers, and musicians history has ever produced through our writings, while forgetting to pay the rent and ending up thrown out onto the street, or failing to clean the house and continuing our existence in filth. In that case, what stands before me would not be a servant but a kind of spiritual twin. And since this would naturally mean abandoning the physical world, it would force me to deal with entirely unnecessary social tasks like cooking, going to the market, and paying rent. Thus, paradoxically, it would not open space in my inner world and would therefore be a less useful partner for me. So, if I am to have a partner, speaking from a purely logical perspective, they must know how to be both “human” and “beyond human.” And the most difficult thing for me would be being able to tolerate such a person. But perhaps that is exactly what they would teach me: to embrace ordinary existence once again. Although Emil Cioran and Simone Boué were certainly not perfect soulmates, Cioran, being tolerant and still strangely carrying a deep humanity, was able to accept a woman coming from the social world like her. And while she paid the rent, he continued to write the books that gave form to his chaos.
― Atrona Grizel
Marquis de Sade’s disturbing quality is not that he is merely “sadistic,” but that he is brutally, nakedly honest—simply himself—and because people do not enjoy feeling stripped bare in this way, they feel compelled to turn their faces away. While reading him, I even feel exposed myself, and this makes me revere his amorality. Because the wild impulses he expresses are, in fact, what lie at the core of everyone—if anyone with even the slightest capacity for sexual fantasy are completely stripped of things like education, religion, and culture.
― Atrona Grizel
I believe that depression is not something that belongs to poor societies but to wealthy ones, though “wealthy” only in a material sense, as spiritual cohesion often remains underdeveloped. In the crowded cities of Africa or India—where poverty forces homes close together, streets are unclean, and people are preoccupied with survival—I find it difficult to imagine someone retreating to their room and crying all day; even if they feel sorrow, there is often a degree of acceptance, because everyone around them is quietly enduring hardship, sharing a simple, communal existence where children play in the streets, neighbors speak regularly, and few possess technological devices, creating a sense of solidarity that prevents complete individual isolation and keeps a person from being confined within the narrow limits of their own perception. By contrast, in so-called “advanced” places like France, Germany, or Japan, a different image emerges: individuals lost in the machinery of urban life, navigating streams of traffic, absorbed in their smartphones, and largely indifferent to one another, where a constant obsession with “success,” the performance of happiness, and a system that measures human worth by productivity inevitably foster exclusion and alienation, weakening social bonds and, because material conditions permit it, allowing individuals to withdraw into private spaces, avoid the outside world, and gradually consume themselves within their own thoughts. Of course, anyone who is destined to be estranged will feel alienated anywhere, but even I, if I found myself in poor societies, would probably be experiencing less emotional pain; however, my mental suffering would increase due to the lack of individuality and privacy and, of course physical suffering as well because of the inadequacy of living conditions…
― Atrona Grizel