The Derelict Agōgē

Within five minutes of sending Counter-Currents an essay on the intellectualization and counter-socialization of a young mind, what the bourgeois world calls “homeschooling,” I was being beaten with two plastic hockey sticks. My son might not know it exactly, but his hyper-violence is an active and formidable break on the becoming-bourgeois demanded of him by every word, image, sound, texture, smell, and taste created and transmitted by the State and its economy.

What we do at home is to create a space in which these transmissions have no power. “There are no priests here,” I said to him this morning, “because there are no slaves here.” There is no overcode that inscribes anything slavish; there is nothing but a form of life made possible by fighting, defiance, thinking supra-critically, and affirming our own circumstances with zero negative input from beyond our home-derelict space.

The content of our quotidian existence comes from several forces: music and words far from the bourgeois norm; techniques and forms of precision associated with weaponry; martial arts; dance; and unbridled ferocious action.

There are toys: pistols, assault rifles, hunting rifles, bows, crossbows, daggers, knives, swords, bow staffs, Monster Trucks, pirates, nomadic horseback warriors, Romans (who now serve as the State that is being reduced to ashes), army dudes (who fight for no flag), dinosaurs, and sharks.

This morning, we discussed types of men. In light of the Fight Club fiasco – in my son’s world all men are muscular badasses who often have shaved heads and fight with aplomb. They wear cool clothes and kickass sunglasses. What they don’t tend to do is smoke cigarettes; so in the end, that is the form of dereliction he associated with Tyler Durden. (Dereliction is always contextual – depending on the very particular assemblage at hand.)

So this morning, the new playmobil barbarian that we added to our pack of State-fighting outlaw badasses suddenly seemed out of place. Not that things have proper places in a world being torn asunder, but this guy … had no weapon. Leave it to playmobil to understand: they give so many great weapons to their figures, yet this one came out of the box seemingly with only his hands to protect himself: no crossbow, no bow, no melee weapon.

And that’s when I realized: this guy is a priest! A goddamn shaman sent to capture and control our pack of outlaw badasses: a Celtic fighter, a Cossack horseman, a Germanic warrior, and a wolf. And now some guy who will protect himself and exert control over the pack with ressentiment and a set of demands that life have more beauty than is apparent to the man who fights to be free of just such sentiments.

So over breakfast we talked about human types, leadership and what specific types of men demand from those who lead and follow, and about the tools of priestly men versus those of nomadic fighting men. I am teaching him about debt and how it is used concurrently by priests, revenuers, and profiteers to capture men like Dark Horse – our playmobil Cossack – and men like us.

His relationship to knowledge will never be priestly. He won’t be passive, not my son, if nothing else.

He’s not being created to get a good job. He’s not being fed to a machine that will make him a docile, comfortable, and compliant citizen.

He wasn’t born for that. My wife didn’t carry him for that. We don’t put food in his mouth or clothes on his back for that. Why would we, as parents, want so little for our son?

My World