Post Ideology - Where the Mind is without Fear

Freedom, for most, if not all of us is merely an ideal to strive towards. Freedom, furthermore, is defined with respect to something, freedom from our parents, from the government, freedom from any sort of oppression. In truth, what we seem to seek freedom from the most is fear, fear of loss, of hurt, of suffering. The question we must deal with, most importantly then, becomes whether it is possible for a mind to be without fear, without conditioning. For our mind expends a great deal of energy in enacting the traditions of our past, in viewing things the way it has been conditioned to, in avoiding suffering. Freedom then, to explore this condition of ours, must be present not at the very end, but at the beginning. To truly understand, one must observe fear, not judge it in order to eliminate it or to allow it to prosper. It is fear that allows us to accept our conditioning, for our conditioning gives us comfort and security. Can the mind truly be without fear? The fears of tomorrow, the uncertainties of the future, the fear of losing one’s loved ones, the fear of never amounting to much in life, can the mind truly be free of these fears? If the answer one refrains to immediately is a simple no, then we have already created a distortion, a refusal to accept the mere possibility of a mind without fear. Our reality is ideologically constructed, this much is evident. Our views of what is pragmatic, what is true, and what is false, are often ideologically informed and constructed. This can be seen in the world around us. Things such as effective policy battling climate change is viewed as impractical, universal basic income, or many other issues that may seem of existential urgency to us are merely viewed as impossible or impractical in being resolved, due to our ideological predispositions. This view is perhaps best encapsulated by a quote from Slavoj Zizek, who said that “it was easier for us to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. Ideology often presents radical, simplified solutions to the problems we face around us. It conceals a gap in reality, to contain a self-sustaining whole, one which does not inspire fear in us. For if we were actively conscious of the events around us at all times, would we not be

horrified by the violence we see around us every day? The world we inhabit is the dystopia we were warned of, with gargantuan wealth inequalities, global surveillance systems, and the systemic oppression of minorities, yet we feel safe, secure. Common people support the use of extreme violence, support wars, and glorify them, as a necessity in order to protect the nation. We live in a deeply violent world, violent not just in the physical sense, but a world which violently strips people of their dignity, of their rights as human beings, and of any chance for them to live a peaceful life. The answer to where the violent tendencies arise is clear, the fact is that they arise from a mind full of fear. The mind expends a lot of energy in fear, and in keeping that fear out. Our minds are trained to accept fear as a fact, and to escape it whenever we feel it, thus never fully resolving it, for one is too scared to ever observe it in silence, without judgement, without distortion. The violence we see is born from the time we are children, through imposition of our thoughts on others, through values such as right and wrong, as well as through traditions. From the time we are children we are knee deep in violence. Traditions, one could identify as the key stakeholder in this process of perpetuating fear, for they always help in the escape from this fear that we’ve been conditioned into. The escape from fear, is the precise function of any ideology, and the reason ideologies work so well. Furthermore, it is why there exists an almost religious devotion to ideological positions, for they tap into our conditioning, allowing us to escape our fears rather than examining them. The devotion to capitalism, for instance lies in its inherent utopianism, the possibility for the culmination of its growth fetish, the heaven of mankind. This is the case with any ideology. The system promises efficiency, and unimaginable wealth generation, as well as “meritocracy.” In short, the system promises you a way to become whole. Of course, that we need a system, an ideology to make us whole is never considered a problem, for we have been conditioned never to examine a problem in all its dimensions, but only to escape it. How then, could one possibly break out of ideology? To break out of ideology, one must in essence require a mind that is without fear. Why, for instance, are we violent? We have an ideal, that one must be non-violent, but in the creation of that ideal we have already distanced ourselves from the actuality of violence. For when one has the ideal of non-violence, one simply sees violence, and immediately regresses to the ideal, that one must be non-violent. Furthermore, in the idealization of non-violence, one has eliminated the ability for non-violence to be an actuality. For if something is an actuality, it is no longer an ideal, is it not? How is one to be non-violent, if one refuses to ever look at violence, to ever understand it? The only way one can be free of violence, then is not through the regression into the tradition of non-violence, but by the very observance of the violence they seek to move away from. For if one observes violence, one can recognize the absurdity of it, and then one is not creating a division between an ideal of non- violence and the actuality of violence, but instead embodies the actuality of non-violence. The root of the existence of violence then, can be thought of as the division that exists between the ideal and the actual, for as long as the ideal exists, there exists an ideological or traditional escape from the actuality of violence. Energy is expended not on the observance of violence, to understand it as what it is, but instead expended on escaping the fact of it.

Having understood the nature of violence, we can go on to address the question of fear, the question we began with. What is fear, if not merely an aversion to what is. We are scared of losing our loved ones, a fact of life that cannot be denied. We will lose the ones we love through circumstances, or ultimately, through death. This causes fear, fear as a reaction to memory. The mind which is full of fear, has been conditioned to feel that way, has it not? There are associations of pain which we experienced in the past, and we must not feel such pain again, thus we feel fear when we think of that pain, for we do not wish for this pain to be reproduced. The other side of this coin, is that of pleasure, another temporal construct. We wish to reproduce pleasure which was experienced by us in the past, and we yet again feel fear, for the possibility of this pleasure not reproducing itself. Fear, thus is born out of temporal associations to pain and pleasure, which are both two sides of the same coin. The traditional response to fear, much like that to violence, isn’t to observe fear, to see where it comes from, why it exists, and to understand its nature, but to instead distort it further, to be courageous, to be brave. The elimination of fear through these ideals, in turn leads to the further propagation of it, for we have never dealt with this question seriously. There is a way for us to look into ourselves without fear, that is to look without judgement, without justification, without distortion. It is to merely accept the fact of fear, which gives rise to the fact of violence. One cannot truly eradicate fear if one does not observe this fear, without judging it. One must not observe fear in order to eradicate it, however, one must merely observe, and in this observance, itself is contained a transformative property. There can be no freedom without the observance of what is, and without freedom there can never be a mind without fear. a post ideological world is not a distant dream, it can be an actuality, if we merely had the discipline and the patience to simply observe what is. One must liberate the mind, for when education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor.

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