The Struggle for Ataraxia

As of time of writing, it is understandably so that a lot of us are disturbed, disillusioned, or even distraught as to what is happening to our world. It can feel like the world is going insane, going out of our control, and we’ll all be put in camps and be slowly yet surely subjected to genocide, because some old, white, American men blame us, who are merely striving to have the free rein to be ourselves, for the crumbling of society, which was already doomed to fail in their hands, because of the unsustainable nature of the capitalist, exploitative order they had themselves crafted and propagated.

But it is precisely at this historical moment, a moment that we did not volunteer to exist in, that we must remain steadfast in our beliefs, and not to be overridden with fear; for fear and anger is precisely the emotions our adversaries wish to impart on us, to make us fall in disarray and direct our anger at ourselves, so that we, the detractors, may dissolve spontaneously while they passively observe the world go down with us without a fight, without a struggle for our voices to be heard.

It’s incredibly easy to feel emotional. Everyone would be emotionally affected to some degree at the misery and suffering happening all across the globe. What is important to let it become our strength and not our weakness. It is important to not let the anger and pressure be directed at ourselves, but at the people who caused us to feel miserable, who caused us to feel caged and hated, and as if we don’t belong in this world, and we should just give up on our goals, our ideals, or even our lives.

To do that is to yield to those who wish us dead, those who wish to silence us.

Now, I’m a programmer, and someone who loves the free and open-source software movement. And anyone who loves FOSS would know, there had already been too many tragedies, too many controversies, too many needless exchanges of emotion that in the end do not meaningfully change the status quo in any way. A default strategy for many suffering under immense pressure and prejudice seems to have developed, which is to generate as much outrage as possible in order to instigate change.

While these attempts might have been successful at removing certain figureheads from a community, changing the entire community takes concrete action, people unified in a goal, and most importantly, time. It takes a while for your ideas, your vision of how everything should be, to be accepted by everyone, should they accept it at all.

One cannot simply assert that one’s ideas are always right, and one cannot say that anyone who disagrees is the devil incarnate. Demonizing people who you wish to convince is not a viable way to achieve concord.

We need to express our dissent, our dissatisfaction with “it is how it is”, productively. No, not “professionally” — that is a venomous term tainted by the corrective and coercive nature of white society. Productively. Convincingly.

In the end of the day, the purpose of any call to action is to convince people to join your cause, to make them believe in what you believe in — it is important to also realize that uncontrolled anger and outrage is also a source of venom, that is infused into every word and sentence once writes. It’s in the wording, the sentence structure, the descriptions of everyone involved: the odor of vitriol oozes out of the text on screen, akin to the scent of ink escaping the confines of calligraphy.

And that vitriol burns. The mark you would leave on your readers is not ideological enlightenment or a sense of one’s purpose renewed, but rather the distasteful char of embers and soot, the remnants of a raging fire that consumed all that it touched, all those who got in its way, even those who had not been the intended targets of hatred.

Hate burns all in its path, and does not help with spreading a message. Even a message against hate from others can itself contain hate.

And it is vital to know how to see hate, to identify it as what it is, to know when you are spreading hate, to know when you are about to release a fiery outburst in the general direction of your object of hatred.

And to stop yourself from doing so.

In Stoic philosophy, there exists a term known as “apatheia” (ἀπάθεια): literally, meaning without suffering. In these times, however, I would argue that it is impossible to actually evade suffering. For many of us, pain and suffering are in every step in our life, physical, mental, or psychological, and to ignore suffering is to put oneself in a delirious state, to fool oneself into thinking that what we have now is perfectly tolerable.

To ignore pain is to ignore why we are fighting against those causing us pain.

However, a complementary concept exists in other forms of philosophy, such as “ataraxia” (ἀταραξία) in Epicurean philosphy, meaning “undisturbed” or “unmoved”, though we may be under constant assault and persecution. To remain unmoved is to remain steadfast, to remain firm. Even if the world is out to get us, we will stand our ground and continue to work to achieve our goals, knowing full well of the challenges in front of us, without letting emotions steer us into dangerous states of mind, without burning what could be our allies.

In a world slowly being consumed by violence and turmoil, to possess ataraxia is to show one’s strength against chaos and hatred, to stand up against the tide.

We need more people willing to stand up.