How to be radical

We often call “open-minded” those who agree with what we think or dislike what we dislike. We sometimes call “open-minded” those who disagree with us the way we expect them to disagree. We seldom call “open-minded” those who challenge our beliefs with unexpected views. It’s hard to recognize creativity if it doesn’t fit the orthodox description for what creativity is supposed to look like.

Be a paradox. Listen to Mozart and Balkan music in between. Go spend a few weeks in a remote village in Transylvania and then a few weeks in New York. Be deeply introspective and contemplative while violently evolving spiritually. Identify as a pensive action-taker. If you engage in retrospection and nostalgia, do so to ferment inspiration—to forge a wild vision of the future rooted in tradition and timeless ideals, a vision capable of inciting intellectual ecstasy among the youth. Waste your time, but strategically and with style and elegance. Eternal vagabonding is not the goal; but the goal is not to work hard either. Then what’s the goal? What you want to do is to design a lifestyle where (deep) work is largely a natural consequence of play, rest, genuine curiosity, and leisure. Don’t work hard by default. Work is not the altar. Work hard because your ambition springs from a boundless desire to manifest yourself spiritually. Elevate your creative project to a noble mission. Take walks. Seek beauty. Don’t be in a rush. Busy people are naturally very active as officials, bankers, lawyers, engineers, consultants, managers, or academics but there isn’t any “higher activity” they’re concerned with, to paraphrase Nietzsche. In this respect, they’re lazy. This is the main deficiency of busy people. They’re busy doing something, anything, yet what they’re doing is “almost always a little bit senseless.” Stop by to smell the flowers. Stop by to feed the birds. You may pass by a few Art Deco buildings almost daily, but how often do you give them the proper analysis they deserve? Drink wine. But only if you like it. Play basketball. But only if you like it. Read voraciously—poetry, fiction, the classics, history, religion, philosophy. Even if you don’t like it. Run. Swim. Build. Design. Paint. Write. Sing. Take your leisure seriously. Even if you don’t like it. Get rich. Or don’t get rich. Realize that money alone doesn’t corrupt creativity. The desire to make money from your craft doesn’t make you dirty; it’s what you do with it that makes the difference. Making (a lot of) money isn’t the problem; that’s admirable—as long as it serves a noble, higher purpose. Marry. And don’t regret it. Don’t marry. And don’t regret it. Have kids. And don’t regret it. Don’t have kids. And don’t regret it. Get a job. Don’t regret it. Start a business. And don’t regret it. Engage in politics—you will regret it—but remember that terms such as “left” vs. “right” or “conservative” vs. “progressive” are largely meaningless without scale and context. We often discuss issues such as pollution, poverty, or corruption from a global perspective yet we fail to consider them locally: in our city, neighborhood, or even family. We’re thus trained to be irresponsible: the more we think and talk about problems we can’t control—the more virtuous we feel but—the more we neglect the problems which are in our control. Don’t wish to be happy. Wish to be “facile, supple, and easily moved. Wish to be in sync with the arrivals and departures of fortune. Wish to be in tune with the progression of light over the course of a day. Wish to be thrown into situations that test your limits, situations that rearticulate your sense of what’s possible. Don’t wish to be happy. Wish to be able to process the drama of attachment and loss.”1 Wish to be able to process death. Wish to be able to process breakups. Wish to be able to live intensely, to think with your flesh, to cherish the mundane, to add meaning to the ordinary, to have a mystical relationship with the present moment. Who lives more intensely and more authentically amid the vital confusion of existence? The one who succeeds in educating their feelings by making them wilder rather than more restrained—in a world of infinite standardization, one must strive to avoid forms and categories to stay sane. You don’t control your emotions; you let them possess you—but to what end? What’s the revolution? What’s the festival? Falling in love with the mundane and the ordinary, with what everyone else fails to see as magical. Don’t wish to be happy. Perceive existence as a perpetual mystery and wish to embrace and love it. Wish to keep going despite uncertainty. Wish to ride the most dangerous waves cheerfully. And then, suddenly, somehow, maybe—you’ll be happy.

Being radical is something that can’t be defined because doing so would create a standard, and that’s against its very definition. Once a manifestation of rebellion has been identified (e.g. hippies), the radical element has been lost and has become a new standard. It’s then performative—an aesthetic, a new way to conform. Note that rebellion is not a virtue in itself. Being different for the sake of being different is no more admirable than conforming for the sake of conforming. Innovation pursued as an end in itself, exalted by modernity as a virtue, is a disaster.

To be continued…