Romanticizing the Rogue

 The archetype of a rogue, a subtle, dandy mysterious thief - moving through life with a certain poise and lightness is what I wish to talk about here. This is a selfish excercise in the exposition of beauty I see.

Life is suffering. We try to forget it often with our societal numbing mechanisms or with plain denial but the fact remains true. The beauty of one's life is in their reaction to this information. Like viktor frankl would say (echoing the thoughts of the stoics), even if everything is taken away from you, how you react to a situation is a slave's freedom that can never be taken. In a recent interview, I really enjoyed the analogy Ido Portal gave of conceptualizing this suffering as an ether almost, that we move through literally and figuratively. Small things like how we walk, talk, breathe and relate to others determine our experience of life to a great degree. 

An 'intelligent' (I use this term in the way Krishnamurti would use it) engagment with life is that which involves remaining in touch with our instincts as we go through it. The first order of business in any propaganda is to alienate man from his instincts. Without anything to ground ourselves in, we become moral beggars looking to intellectualization, god or authority to validate how we move through life. A nietzschean conception of life based on aesthetics over ethics - with the requisite integrity and sincerity to structure it in a way that is harmonious with society. That is the real challenge. 

I think in some sense, a lot of religious doctrines seem to be heuristic solutions to that - for only when one is "trained" in morality can they let go and live with the full intensity of their being without hurting another. Think patanjali's Ashtanga Yoga or the eightfold path in Buddhism.

I would also like to conceptualize suffering as ignorance in the way it is done in advaita Vedanta. This connects Ido Portal's teachings to a movement also within our minds (on second reading also to chitta vritti nirodha - the only way to stop a movement from causing ripples is to be that ripple - but that is a thought for another time). Are you a philosopher? A machine learning researcher? A creative? A corporate worker? A mother? each role we inhabit, each mask we don also changes how we interact with our field of awareness. It is a constriction of that space of pure creativity which we do voluntarily (atleast at some subtle level?). 

Having an awareness that - at the end of the day, each mask we inhabit is just that - a mask - imbues you with a kind of lightness in moving through life. What is important is whether your mask is effective to accomplish that which you desire. Even that is not really important, for it is a byproduct of that desire in the first place. What is really important then, is just the genuineness of that desire.

Coming back to the point about the Rogue. The rogue is an interesting archetype to me because of exactly this reason. When I think of the rogue, I'm thinking Francois Tolour in Ocean's 11 (12? i don't remember which one it was with the cool sequence of music of him dancing between lasers), or Selina Kyle in the Batman comics. The rogue does not "need" anyone. They do not conform to societal notions of morality. Though they would be punished if they got caught in society, they are always somehow able to give them the slip. In some senses it is important to be this rogue or petty thief in the realm of ideas - this attitude I claim, is an essential for creativity. 

A rather famous book about creativity is Austin Kleon's "Steal like an Artist". To be a creative, you do require some disregard for societal convention, the ability to steal whatever you need from collective knowledge to deal with your own problems and the ability to slip back in - the skills and technique extraordinaire so that it catches any critique with a sucker punch - In some sense this is related to the DeBordian spectacle, but subtly different. Instead of being spectacularly brilliant necessarily, there is also ingenuity in having your art be able to pretend to be a part of the "Culture Industry", to lull the reader into engaging with it with abandon, to get engrossed in it. And right when they have their guard down, you buck the norm and subtly plant an idea into their head a la Inception.

The petty thief doesn't really hate society. Their actions sometimes are calling out the exorbitant excesses in society that everyone knows to be true but is either too numb or benefitting too much from to point out. For example, with catwoman it is stealing from the excessively rich and corrupt of gotham. In today's landscape these excesses are much different. It is the complacent numbness of our bougie lifestyles, excessive intellectualization in the ivory towers, performative activism, the propaganda coming in from every screen. Hell, in some sense the greatest revolution today is to live a completely simple and sane lifestyle. If you can use the culturally widespread mediums but buck the message they send, that is creativity. 

Of course, this is not so simple because of the autopoeitic nature of the mediums of content transfer. Even this sense of irony has been co-opted into the system itself. Teaching deep introspective philosophy through a TikTok is something that has already been tried. Making memes about touching grass, the Post Ironic return to sincerity has also already been commodified. It is almost as if this space of our minds has saturated, rotted, then become the same again and yet we remain stuck. 

In some sense this romanticized conception of the rogue is almost innocent, in a nietzschean sense. The baby who tramples a glass vase while running behind a ball they were attracted to. Their survival instincts are more important than the societal convention. 

In an artistic sense, getting stolen from also puts you on your toes (I do not condone material stealing, I am just carrying out the metaphor). If someone steals from my work an insight and synthesizes it into something beautiful in their own work, it makes me want to think about how I could put together ideas from different sources (possibly from the person who stole from me) in new and engaging ways too. Of course, I am using steal in the sense Austin Kleon used it, not in the sense of uncredited plagiarism. There should be a sense of honor, even among thieves.

That is all I wanted to talk about today. Thanks for reading and feel free to steal these ideas if they caused some neuron firing in your brain.