The Lambent

Tag: Kierkegaard

  • To Provoke Your State

    To Provoke Your State

    This staircase, it leads only to
    Some old pictures of you
    Through an a thousand mile long tube

    Black Country, New Road – Concorde

    The orator no longer need stand, huddled by masses for declaration.
    The author, free from the printing press’s oppression.
    The artist, no longer bound by the material limitations of space.

    How incredibly horrifying / wondrous!

    I can provoke your emotional state using agreed upon symbols running “through an a thousand mile long tube.” What responsibility! Either laugh at Charlie Kirk’s death / Or calmly explain the implications of political violence and practical harms of right-wing politics1. Either / Or2, it doesn’t really matter. You’ll tell me I deserve death regardless while either reciting jumbled talking points from a YouTube grifter3 / Or a Twitch streamer who read half of The Communist Manifesto before ADHD forced their return to TikTok.

    I can provoke your rational state using vocal utterances bouncing hollowly between the cave walls within your echo chamber. Either tell you Jewish space lasers caused a series of wildfires4, sourced from my personal opinion of how wildfires spread and an antisemitic worldview / Or that heating our planet with fossil fuels is bad, sourced from peer-reviewed academic papers5. Either / Or, it doesn’t really matter. We’re all lunatics lighting ourselves on fire with torches cast in midday sun6. It’s not like we even notice though. Either you’re unhealthily obsessed with one random guy exploiting a welfare program to notice Peter Thiel pouring gasoline onto your already enlightened head / Or burning yourself alive is in fashion now, it can’t be harmful if we’re all doing it.

    To expound upon that sickening amalgamation festering between our neurons would in all likelihood provoke the few brain cells left within my skull’s containment to disappear in shame for who we are. The potential of our connected globe, yet we stumble continually through a revolving door of either Andrew Tate / Or Vaush. Insisting that there exist only two choices for building a fantasy world balanced on delusion. Repetition of the declarative statement, “humanity cannot think for itself.” Therefore, we must happily sip idiocy, rather than provoke our own mindful state. Either laughing with glee at suffering / Or bored out of our mind at the brain rot we’re ingesting. Either way, it doesn’t matter because we’re all collectively chanting with a deranged gleam in our eye, “Let those whose bile we consume, consume us.”

    There sits endless space – Our obligation to take voice, pen, and brush to it. The only means by which to defy slop is to confound it with art. There is a possibility that truth continually lies, obscured under this stupor of idiocy. But if there exists only idiocy, then one might rightfully conclude that only idiots exist and surrender to becoming an idiot themself, for we are social creatures. To idle among the void-sized hole AI’s bile has formed is to surrender humanity to a tech billionaire. To an oligarch proclaiming before your face through action that he doesn’t believe in your right to existence.

    In some sense, “Boredom is the root of all evil.”7 Not because boredom provokes oneself to engage with irrational activity, but rather because its passivity allows boredom’s default production of uninspired product to be assimilated into the bile by those with goals less than humanity’s enrichment through art and reason.

    References:

    1. Three Arrows. “The Myth of Charlie Kirk,” October 12, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh0el8phS_o. ↩︎
    2. Søren Kierkegaard, The Essential Kierkegaard, Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 43-46. (Either / Or An Ecstatic Discourse) ↩︎
    3. Shoe0nHead, “These People Are Sick,” September 18, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJENP0Rr8p0. ↩︎
    4. Justin Gray, “MTG Says the Deadly California Wildfires May Have Been Caused by Lasers From Space,” X, January 28, 2021, accessed December 21, 2025, https://x.com/JustinGrayWSB/status/1354870334655262724. ↩︎
    5. hbomberguy, “Climate Denial: A Measured Response,” May 31, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLqXkYrdmjY. ↩︎
    6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche: The Gay Science, Cambridge University Press, 2001, 125. ↩︎
    7. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Essential Kierkegaard, 2000, p. 51. ↩︎

  • Humanity Itself

    Humanity Itself

    Body, soul, mind: To the body belongs sensations, to the soul impulses, to the mind principles.1

    Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

    Remember,

    You can not expect all humanity to see reason as apparent. We are so shortly removed from our enlightenment that we must still gather together these principles which govern our reason.

    We desire activity.
    We desire leisure.
    We desire food.
    We desire sex.
    We desire procreation.
    We desire companionship.
    We desire community.
    We desire domination.
    We desire compassion.

    All these desires – impulses, not gathered carefully in reason’s care, rather evolved through selection pressures fitted to survival. Therefore, to give into this desire without first committing to reason is to deny humanity’s Enlightenment through reason.

    This is not to say that impulse acted on through desire for bodily sensation is of itself uniquely evil. Repression is to deny your humanity – to betray your own soul. For humanity is not segregated to reason, we are still who we are. Casting away 4 billion years of life’s evolution2 would be rather deranged. Impulse has driven us to new frontiers, to the craters and mountains upon our lone satellite. Desire will drive us farther still to new expanses beyond our current comprehension. Impulse blessed us with art, with love, with sacrifice, with glory. Without impulse, we would utterly lack that which makes us so strangely and uniquely human. One should not allow the chemicals in their brain to govern their actions. For we observe the natural consequence wrought through blind impulse, the horrors consuming as a fire unfought our so pragmatically constructed institutions. But reason tooled as a conqueror shall utterly repress the impulsive drive of desire and stamp out our dying light, casting us into the eternal night.

    Let others complain that the times are evil. I complain that they are wretched, for they are without passion.3

    Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

    I see in the light a transcendent humanity.
    One –
    Glorious collective, jointed together in our individuality.
    To transcend – stabbing into what we feared was eternal night,

    A NEW DAWN

    One –
    By which we cast off the pettiness etching such violent dispersions through our minds. To see clearly in each other’s eye the clarity of this opportunity before us. My own small part brought into focus through the endless reflection from your collective eye,

    A NEW RENAISSANCE ENLIGHTENED –

    By impulsive-reason.
    Though abandoned by our every God, thrown without mercy into the chaotic void. Or perhaps more terrifyingly by means of our ignorance,

    …we have killed him! How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves? Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it?4

    Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

    Let us then gather our bearings so that we may find ourselves worthy. For the swords shall be beaten still to plowshares!5 Preach this gospel of true hope! Is it not the conditions which regard our swords as worthless, not God directly?6 This now our great responsibility! There is no God nor cosmic force willing to bend our weapons for us, to redeem us from needless annihilation. We must bear the responsibility – equipping the hammer, lighting the flame, and standing before the anvil. Not to contort our swords, rather by the labor of our souls upon the anvil of progress forging the obvious choice for our next generation.

    Humanity, the closest force to God we now know. Therefore, our duty must be that which necessitates the burdens of our universe and nature itself. The terrifying and yet joyous truth, we are so pitifully far from deity – wonderfully and fearfully Humanity!7 A humanity which birthed God in the clarity of impulse and through deluded reason murdered him! A Humanity which must embrace this universal chaos through transcendence. Transcendence, not to ascend our Humanity, rather to faithfully clasp to it in the light of impulsive-reason. That we might with accuracy interpret our bodily senses amidst these chaotic seas. Before us the task assigned to the Gods, We are to face Leviathan – utterly alone. Just as our ancestors, only now not deceived into believing We are aided in this endeavor. Our only force, what We muster for battle from our globe of priceless treasures, not of gold, rather the pearl of Enlightened flesh and blood8 – Humanity itself Renaissanced.

    For he who values his own intelligence and the divinity within him and the worship of his excellence before all else, plays no tragic part, does not groan, does not need either solitude or much company.9

    Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
    References
    1. Marcus Aurelius, Justin Martyr, Walter Pater, and Irwin Edman, Marcus Aurelius and His Times : The Transition From Paganism to Christianity, print (Walter J. Black, INC, 1945), 32. ↩︎
    2. Bell, Elizabeth A., Patrick Boehnke, T. Mark Harrison, and Wendy L. Mao. “Potentially Biogenic Carbon Preserved in a 4.1 Billion-year-old Zircon.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 47 (October 19, 2015): 14518–21. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1517557112. ↩︎
    3. Søren Kierkegaard, The Essential Kierkegaard (Princeton University Press, 2000), 40. ↩︎
    4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Josefine Nauckhoff, and Adrian Del Caro, Friedrich Nietzsche: The Gay Science, pdf (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 120. ↩︎
    5. Isaiah 2:4 (NRSVUE) ↩︎
    6. Isaiah 2:3 ↩︎
    7. Psalm 139:14 ↩︎
    8. Matthew 13:45,46 ↩︎
    9. Aurelius, Martyr, Pater, and Edman, Marcus Aurelius and His Times : The Transition From Paganism to Christianity, 29. ↩︎