You write to me about political news. If you knew how indifferent I am to all that. For more than two years I haven’t touched a newspaper. All those debates are for the present without meaning for me...
- Arthur Rimbaud
"Oh, Happy Melancholic, stop your cowardly neutrality and take a stance in this ongoing war between the forces of darkness and the forces of light in our world. Our world is the best among possible worlds, and nothing can be better than it. So, leave behind your cowardice and negativity, and join the war on the side of truth, with us. Otherwise, you will be counted among the enemies of truth, our enemies..."
Often, the Happy Melancholic hears such preachy speeches from his friends and acquaintances, trying to lure him into taking a direct political stance in the face of the horrors happening in the world. They delude him into believing that the truth is in the hands of a certain party, that evil is the speciality of the enemy of that party, and that the war between them is a war between right and wrong. And if you don't choose the truth, then you are inevitably one of the people of falsehood.
The false binary embarrassment clamp is a rusty mental tool they use to try to uproot the happy misanthrope from the position he has chosen for himself so that they can see him clearly. If he is against them, they fight him, and if he is with them, they recruit him to fight alongside them, but they do not achieve their goal because he is resistant to classification. He is a being immersed in his individuality and cannot be a piece of wood in a fire that does not concern him, nor a soldier in a war declared by emperors, in which the common people and their dupes are crushed.
This is how you are classified and finished by being placed on one of the shelves of ideological misery. Your silence provokes their thunder, they fear your ambiguity and uniqueness, and no eye accepts you until they are sure of your position: either with them or against them. You cannot dwell outside their manipulated zone, their binary logic that divides the world into primitive dichotomies of us and them, good and evil, light and darkness, mercy and Satan.
The Happy Melancholic emphasizes his individuality, which is considered one of the virtues he follows in his life. Our protagonist is occupied with himself and seeks nothing but his own pleasure and tranquillity. This is because his life is short and does not have room to be wasted in struggles for values and ideals that are impossible to spread in a world dominated by tendencies of violence and greed.
How can one follow behind a leader or politician who adopts slogans such as nation, nationalism, identity, religion, and glory-making and trades them in the market of noble ideals and timeless values?
These statements have been exploited throughout the history of humanity by those in power, whether temporal or spiritual. Epics and glories were written with the blood of communities that sacrificed themselves for their identities. However, the Happy Melancholic refuses to be a pawn serving the king at the expense of his individual happiness.
The misery of humanity will not end except with the extinction of its kind, and the fire of the Holocaust will not be extinguished without ceasing to kindle it, and the "seditions" will not end except by abandoning them. This is what our friend's opinion has settled on. The happy nihilist has not retreated from his positions recorded on previous occasions: opposition to reproduction, despair of humanity, the will of annihilation, resignation from public life, retiring from major issues, and clinging to his simple individual pleasures. These are the virtues through which he directs his ephemeral life.
Previous parts
The Happy Melancholic Part 1: How Can the Melancholy Endure Their Stay in the World?
The Happy Melancholic Part 2: Existence is a Burden: the Meditations of an Absurd Being
The Happy Melancholic Part 3: About the Genealogy of Evil
The Happy Melancholic Part 4: A Man Who Does Not Know And Knows That He Does Not Know