The Free Thinker’s Manifesto

“Man, whether he likes it or not, is a being forced by his nature to seek some higher authority. If he succeeds in finding it of himself then he is a superior man; if not, he is a mass-man and must receive it from his superiors.” ~ Jose Ortega y Gasset

A specter is haunting the status quo –the specter of free thinking. Alas, the mass-man is too much “mass” and not enough “man.” He is too much victim and not enough hero. He is too much fear and not enough courage. His brains, cadaverous from too much dead time. His mind, worn thin from lack of imagination and too much propagandized divisiveness. His eyes, cow-eyed, eye-guarded, with a dead mackerel stare from being over-herded and playing the victim. His heart, repressed and stifled from too much nine-to-five slavery and not enough unf*ck-the-world anarchy.

The mass-man suffers from fixed thinking. He can only be usurped by the overman, who flourishes in free thinking. More importantly, the mass-man is an aspect of us all, and can only be appropriated and reconciled by its counterpoint: the overman within us all. Similar to how it’s our responsibility alone to reconcile our own shadows in order to become more holistic, we must also reconcile our own mass-man in order to become more open-minded.

As it stands, the history of all hitherto existing human conditions is the history of free and fixed thinking. Non-conformist and conformist, disobedient and obedient, dissident and sycophant, unorthodox and orthodox, have been in constant conflict with one another. An opposition that each time ended, either in progressive and creative evolution, or in regressive and stagnate devolution.

It is high time that free thinkers should openly, in the face of the whole world, pronounce their liberated views, their flexible aims, their imaginative tendencies, their radical art, and meet the State-suckling, history-possessed, single-minded fixed thinkers with a manifesto of Free Thinking itself.

Hint: this is best accomplished using a mirror.

The marks of a free thinker are the ability to question everything, the ability to stretch comfort zones, the ability to flatten status quo boxes, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown.

Questioning everything

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” ~ Immanuel Kant

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