My husband and I were discussing anarchy last night and I said that a true and total state of anarchy could only be achieved through mental illness, such as schizophrenia, in addition to the death of the state. Mind-altering drugs would also work to the same purpose. Why would this be anarchy? Anarchy is not limited to politics, it is the total release from everything such that no constraints remain whatsoever; it is the path to the ultimate unmediated freedom. We don’t know what this freedom means yet because we have never had it, but I believe that it is becoming God (because God is, by definition, free). Anarchy is the only way to realize what Ralph Waldo Emerson in an essay said of the poet - the transformation into the primordial Adam-as-creator. To be on the side of God, as Sartre put it.
While we can conceivably get rid of the state and live in a state of nature, such as that at the time of the inception of humanity (let’s take God out of the picture for the moment), we cannot be released from time. It binds us in every way. We are forever “born free, but everywhere in chains.” Mental illness and drug use are, however, known to be problematic precisely because they disconnect us from reality, including the realities of time.
Thanks to the string theory, theists have a new way to conceputalize God and his omniscience; they now have a scientific way to understand how God can transcend time and see the present, the future, and the past at the same moment, exist across dimensions. Of course humans transcend time in a limited manner too: our consciousness as for itself enables us to see not only what is, but what can be and what is not. Sartre and Heidegger thought this way; Sartre in his book “What Is Literature?” wrote: “with every word I utter, I involve myself a little more in the world, and by the same token I emerge from it a little more, since I go beyond it toward the future”. In this way we kill and create anew.
But I argue that we transcend while remaining spatially and perspectively in the present: when we imagine the future, we literally IMAGINE it, we are not IN IT. We always imagine it from the perspective of the present, so unlike what Heidegger and others said we do not transcend at all; we remain within the confines of time. We do not create and we do not have the power to kill because this requires freedom, we simply modify a system.
The only existing way that appears is mental illness and drug use then. Why are these things so bad, so wrong? The law argues them to be, and so does medical practice. But our current laws can be traced back, ultimately, to Christianity and religion. It stands to inference that our medical and legal system is stained by religion and God. Thus, there must be some reason that God did not want us to take hallucinogenic and other generally mind-altering drugs. Why? We would truly transcend time then, we would simultaneously exist in many dimensions, time as a controlling entity would cease to exist. Why is this so forbidden by God? Instead of blindly accepting that so-called illnesses such as schizophrenia and drug use are wrong, we must question why they are, we must demand why God forbids them. We must attempt to discover what truly happens at the moment of hallucination; the intentions of the drug user do not matter at all. They and the individual is irrelevant. Something very sinful and subversive is happening at the moment of hallucination that God has forbidden humanity to engage in.
Some of the brightest and most creative minds over the ages have taken drugs and had mental illnesses. Off the top of my mind, I can think of Lewis Carroll, Foucault and his sadomasochistic homosexuality and drug use during his time teaching at at UC Berkeley, Aldous Huxley, Louis Althusser, John Nash, Van Gogh, Jorge Luis Borges, the countless suicides. Did these figures not achieve godliness in some way? They created and they destroyed. They were functional. They achieved more than we ever will in our saneness and our drug-free lives.
I believe that all forms of the grotesque in different ways lead to anarchy of the mind and thus total freedom. Instead of hallucinating perpetually however, I believe that all such endeavours must be controlled and that most importantly we must conduct devoted study of the grotesque not only to discover the true nature of insanity (an archaic term) and hallucinations, but also how this connects to God, because in some essential as yet unelucidated way, it does. At no moment should we excise the question of time and release from time from such discovery. One example I can think of is extreme forms of self-mutilation where the affected individual self-castrates, self-amputates, and, as has been documented, takes out his eyeballs. This form of self-mutilation, the most extreme, invariably occurs during hallucinations and delusions.
I am reminded of the schizophrenic relative in my family who was locked up in a room. Who defecated and urinated, ate and existed in that room. What mental life she must have had, how close must she have been to God.