My struggle

I dedicate this little piece to Mrs. Elsa Normie from SanFran, who made me quit W@W.
I'm not an anthropologist, but I was always fascinated by human behavior and interactions. I can enjoy
any work of literature, be it a classic age-defying magnum opus, or just a commerce mundane piece of
entertainment like an illustrated light novel for two main reasons: 1, an interesting setting and technical
background, sometimes referred to as world-building, all the sometimes superficial, but nevertheless
interesting concepts and faux technical details enumerated without the actual need to make them real;
to present workable blueprints for our reality. Just a free roam through the mind of the homo technic,
the world-altering human being, the Creator, the Fashionist. And the second reason to my enjoyment is
relatable characters.
When I was a child, I was always a bit smaller, weaker and scrawnier than most of my classmates. Not
too bright or quick, in fact I was always relatively slow in everything. Studying, creative work and
human relations. Not a pariah, or a living trope of the Bullied Nerd Kid, in fact would have liked to be
one of them to just belong somewhere. I was just the eternal toadie, hanging around the most powerful,
the most creative, the most intellectual. Always just struggling to if not catch up to them, to be worthy
of hanging around with them. Maybe this is why I never managed to build anything more than
workgroup/playgroup relations, the reason I never managed to build real, long-lasting friendships. I got
along with people, I had fallouts, but in the end we always drifted apart, when we graduated from
school, left summer camp, stopped working for the same company.
I was never on my own, but I was always alone. This is why I was captured by stories about true, longlasting friendship, deep emotions, love and loyalty. Something that was always missing from my life,
strong connections I always missed. My parents were working hard to make ends meet, I had to spend
the afternoons with my grandma in a different apartment from home and my home was always scary
for me, an empty place I had to go after it got dark. But eventually I accepted this is how things are, I
accepted and made an escape into imaginary worlds, into different settings, where I can experience
things I failed to grab in real life.
One of the most interesting aspects of social life is group mechanics. Again, I'm not an anthropologist,
so this is just something I read about somewhere and can't really take responsibility for the
accurateness of the social model I'm about to describe, but some nomadic African tribes can solve their
conflicts, when they can't suffer each other any longer or the conflict is too strong to be handled by

words and gestures, by splitting apart and going to different directions. No violence, no fight. The
concept immediately grabbed my imagination.
In a vast universe, if we can gain the ability to travel far away and survive and secure resources for
ourselves and to satisfy our needs, this can be the end of human conflicts. In the works of Isaac Asimov
and especially the Nemesis-series, he described, how like-minded and ethnically homogeneous
communities will form the first space colonies and humanity will increasingly become more and more
diverse and drift apart as time progresses.
And I genuinely think that this divergence can be a wonderful thing. Humanity was united or at least
connected in a global community by technological progress, and now the same progress can set us
apart again. And it's all for the ever advancing evolution. It used to be purely genetic, communities
become isolated and adapt to their new environment, develop new organic. natural assets and then
share them through hybridization if they are still compatible. The same thing can now be applied to our
culture, technology and philosophy.
There's a strong need to have distinct schools of thought and workshops that can work and develop
independent and competing concepts, but there's another need to sometimes combine these efforts and
work together. Both have part of this world.
Separatism and federalism. Endogamy and exogamy. Mercantilism and international trade.
This is why I consider myself, as a pure political and social concept, liberal. I'm not liberal in the sense
of the American New Left liberalism, 90s neoliberalism or even classical XIX. century liberalism. I do
not advocate for universal Human Rights, simply because I don't believe in the underlying
metaphysical morality that could beget such an idea into this world.
I believe in the Organic Human though. Not as a humanist or a liberal, but as a liberal, in the
etymological sense of the world. One, who believes in freedom, or going back even further, one who
stands for the will of free men, the people. Because in the end, everyone is free. We are all free,
because we are all ourselves, the sole masters of our souls, minds and bodies.
As long as we're awake, as long as we are still in the Ring, we are fighters. Our chances may be low.
For most of us, this life is at the maximum a small, tiny contribution to even the nomosphere, the
homosphere, not to mention the whole wide universe. Most of us aren't born to be great scientists,
doctors, engineers or even businessmen, artists or leaders. We will lead uneventful, dull lives and our
contributions will only be truly noticed by our family and friends and that's the lucky case of having a

family and good friends, who care about us.

But all the while, we are still us. We are still the agents in charge of ourselves, the actors in our plays,
the protagonists of our lives. We will only experience everything through ourselves and we will always
have the last word in what we should do, how and when.
This is the fundamental concept of my liberalism. Every society, every community around the world is
made up of free people. People who lead their own lives and make their own choices. If they choose to
follow a strong leader. If they adore a monarch and put their faith in him or even a supernatural being
and powers; if they choose to secede and stray away from a larder group, if they decide to make new
friends, wed themselves to new concepts, ideas, structures and people, if they syndicate, if they
compete, if they live in peace or kill each other in wars. Every step they make, every breath they take is
controlled by thousands of self-aware agents, who will struggle for their own little goals in life.
Survival, safety, acceptance and all their dreams beyond. Some people will be swept away by the
binding reality, forced to do things, day by day raped into a fate he despises and rejects, others will be
able to surface and catch a bite of fresh air and choose their fate more freely. This is why people always
struggle to be free. Not just from other people, but from the whole world. Some will subjugate
themselves to their fellow humans to get protection from the Crushing Wheel of reality, to flee from the
hardships of having to deal with everything on their own. Peasants beg lords to rule over them and
protect them. People run back to their abusive spouses, so they don't have to be lonely, don't have to
deal with bills on their own. Runaway slaves gave themselves up for food and shelter on the brink of
death from starvation.
The trope is Rex Mundi. Ruler of the World, the Demiurge. Blind Fate, an uncaring God, a cold,
lifeless Universe surrounding us and we are just fragile little things. Little girls, who love sunshine and
green meadows filled with flowers and all wonders of life, but when the day comes Death, the powerful
force of Reality will come to take us away, take us, rape us and show us the face of this world, as it is.
This is necessary, yet people struggle against it, they shut themselves in, raise walls, try to secure their
livelihoods, their livestock, their crops, prolong their lives through medicine, just to gain a bit more. A
tiny patch of land conquered from the ever-raging sea and endless floods.
And the blight of harsh reality isn't just in uncaring, the ruthless nature of the dead matter, it's in the
hurtful acts of our comrades, our peers. It's a trite, but we erect mental walls to protect ourselves from
each other, when you get into a relationship, every relationship with acknowledging and expecting the
outcome of drifting away, the inevitable sad departure.

It's even easier if we were never truly close. It's just a quaint, quiet goodbye and that's the end of it.
Nowadays, people can meet as many people through social media and internet interest groups as they
want. Hundreds, thousands of meaningless, superficial relationships. And if things go south, there's no
way to get truly violent. Some name-calling, or meaningless attempts to hurt each other, complete
strangers through a cold, distant medium and then both of them can go the opposite directions, never to
hear from each other again.
And so in these relations the faux, cold foxfire of human bonding can vanish even quicker, disappear
into nothing in a blink of an eye. You can just not log on to the site for a week, then a month and maybe
one day you get a sudden realization that something disappeared from your life again, a little, probably
useless trinket that you just remembered you had is gone. You shrug and go through the milling days
and endless robot again.
Losing connections you never truly had is easier than ever, it's now just couple of clicks and non-clicks
away. And nothing binds these people together. If you don't visit your family or act distant towards
your colleagues you will, at some point run into them and have to deal with an awkward situation. With
people you choose to associate with from far away both geographically and socially, you don't have
these chances. You are free, truly free from any consequences.
The only options are hang together, associate yourselves a bit, or stop doing that and have nothing to do
with each other. This makes some forms of interaction invalid and meaningless.
You can't order people around, you can't force them, make them work against their will. You can't take
over their lives, can't eat them up more than they're willing to let you. You can judge them, give them
guidance, encourage them and ask them, but at any point of the relation, you have to stay in touch with
them, not to severe the ties with them, unless this is what you want.
I can only give a simile from things I know about, so here's one: interacting with people in this manner
is like managing a distant device through SSH or some other remote access method. You can get in
touch, if they're already up for it and communicate with them, even manipulate them if they give access
to their inner parts, but they will always remain far away.
If you break them, you won't be near to fix the connection. No console cable to just plug in and restart
the configuration, no default hardware reset button to push and force a new connection. They are gone.
The American artist, Tyler the Creator said that bullying in the internet can be handled very easily. You
can just walk away. You can just flake on the relation, leave behind the things that hurt you.

I'm sort of already through 4 pages of a rambling that started as comment and snowballed into this
thing I wrote instead of bowing my head in defeat and accept your terms. So it'd be very insincere to
say that it doesn't mean anything. That I don't care at all. As another Internet celebrity, Jon Jafari said,
I care immensely.
I could argue that I don't owe anything to this community. That I don't need to pull my weight,
especially I don't need to do your bidding to have the right not to be bullied constantly, not to be
treated like a bitch. I could get into the petty arguments and wave around my little album of OCs, badly
edited joke pictures in a style of a free counterculture, desperately trying to fight for your acceptance as
my senior member of this community, who indeed put much effort into some projects, something I
never even tried to deny. I'd like to point out here that I mentioned that most of the art created in the
camp was made by the campers themselves to raise myself up, not to push you down. To claim credit
for bringing in the very people, who made those things. Indeed an act of truly stupid vanity, but I want
my intentions to be clear. And I also have to even apologize, since of course the camp probably
involved administration and organization on your part I couldn't even see. And on this note, I could
fight back and point out all the other things I did for this community you didn't see. The recruitment
we did with Kronos, the mentoring of more than a hundred new players, making a forum for them,
alone, trying to organize them, alone. Things, rewardless, stupid efforts both Scolar and me had to go
through, and I'll claim I had to do more, since I didn't want just a war machine. I wanted anything but
that. I wanted new members for this community, a vibrant group of people, who can enjoy the
aforementioned foxfires of ephemeral satisfaction of human bonding.
But I won't argue with you. I won't speak for myself in the end, but I also won't let myself over to you
or your comrades after a point. Because both would be denying myself of what I really want, it would
miss the cardinal point of the whole issue.
Namely that you can't ever do that. You can't force people to enjoy your company, your community, to
participate in it. And I don't mean that you mustn't, that you what you'd do is morally wrong. I mean
you physically, logistically can't. You can't cyberbully anyone ever into liking you. You can drive them
away, easily. And you're doing that, but you can't win them over. Not through a remote connection, not
if it'll just a bother and bother and nothing more.

I now formally bow my head, since you're cleary in, and I'm proven to be out, over and over again. You
from time to time showed me that neither me or scolar is welcome among your ranks. Both of us spent
our times probably very-very unwisely trying to chase after something so fake and so cold, yet so
unreachable.
In the end, you won everything you wanted. You raped me and got away with it. But only because I let
you. And I won't let you ever again. Goodye.