I see it that freedom is effectively universal as it is the primary contention within political debate. Though not so inclined to say anything of human nature, I posit that the primary concern that all parties have within any political debate or dispute is, first, of their freedom from coercion, as no debate can be had without it, and, second, of the cultivation of their own liberty. I do not agree with Isaiah Berlin. Though everyone prefers to be let to cultivate a way of life than they do to demand not to be subjugated, as the former is contingent upon the latter, it will always be demanded first, which is to say that, despite that positive freedoms are more lofty than negative freedoms, politics just simply are predicated upon negative ones.

Albert Camus coined "the Absurd" to describe the post-war malaise of a world devoid of meaning. Given the sheer number of genocides in the Twentieth Century, it is difficult to believe in the Age of Enlightenment meta-narrative of civilized progress. The apparent catastrophe of the First and Second World War left people without hope for the new age of industrialization. To apply Camus's concept to a political context concerning freedom, I would think that you would have to consider his time in the French Resistance. The legal and extra-juridical regimens of Fascism are nothing but entirely absurd. No political satire can adequately mock the tyrannical hysteria, evident hypocrisy, ruthless rancor, or nefarious duplicity of a Fascist regime. You can call them criminals, a political mafia, war profiteers, imperialists, serial killers, or megalomaniacs, but there is no insult to level at a Fascist that is more to the point than to call them what they just simply are, which is a "Fascist". That the abuse of power came to be actualized by men who are beyond even caricature, to some, seemed as if it were a punishment from the divine. Though I don't claim to be among their ranks, I would also suggest that there is a certain poverty to the resistance against totalitarianism. Because it is not the sort of thing that people talk about, it is difficult to describe. I've always felt that it was best embodied by a character playing the ocarina in the sewer in Andrzej Wajda's Kanal. When your existential status is contingent upon that a resistance movement is effective, you have no opportunity to cultivate a way of life. Life, for them, becomes a theatre of cruelty. You grow old as a young man and bitter. You learn to let go of hate, not because you aren't righteous in your indignation, but just simply because you have to. The youthful revelry of revolution fades with the first shot. You become calculating. You're no longer reckless, but all the more suicidal. You hate only what it has made of you, which is calculating and cruel. You think that they must be like that too, but you don't know and could never find out. You wonder if they just don't have an advantage. They know what it's like to consign themselves to power. You do your best to hold onto what faith you had in your ideals, but you start to see things differently. Politics cease to have anything to do with it at all. They just want you dead and you can barely even justify remaining alive. You forget about humanity and history. It just becomes about you and other people, mostly men, like you.

I have become taken by my prose and have forgotten what purpose I had in writing this. I guess that I just wanted to talk about the composer in Kanal. I don't think that even Wadja knows why he constructed the situation that he did. I don't think that I do either, though am willing to make a guess. I'd guess that I'd say that he just wants to play the piano. Everything else in the world and his life fades and he only remains in the resistance so that he can play the piano. It becomes about something like that. It becomes all too personal and absurd. He just wanted to play and felt like they wouldn't let him. He's now willing to die for something like that. It's things like that that people just don't let go of. That's what they don't understand about people like him.

So as to return to my original purpose, what you don't want to do is what you will always necessarily have to, which is to demand liberation. What you do want to do is what only people of certain classes, and class is not exclusively relegated to material wealth, can, which is to cultivate a way of life. I harbor not jealousy of the ruling classes, however. Were I to have been born in wealthy family, I would have become a wealthy artist. I see no reason to express animosity towards a person who has done what I would do were I to be them. What I must refuse, however, is to become subjugated by them. What, to me, seems to be absurd is that they seem to believe that I have to prove this to them. Having to prove this to them is what results in the many absurdities of our intellectual environment. Consider the philosopher that I have chosen to independently study, Giorgio Agamben, for instance. Though certainly profound, perceptive, original, elegant, and extraordinarily intelligent, his writing, even in his works of political philosophy which lay out his axioms in such a manner that he must believe to be clear, is nothing but high-flown to the point of an idiosyncratic eccentricity. The reason that philosophers utilize high-flown speech is not, as some rather recondite left-wing intellectuals seem to believe, to conceal their theories from omnipresent gaze of the Intelligence community, but rather to encode it in such a manner that leaves their political opponents without any form of plausible deniability to what they call to light. It's like an alternative universe of Franz Kafka's The Trial wherein a young Italian actor became the world's foremost legal theorist, specializing in the legal history of the Third Reich, so as to finally make it impossible for Neoconservative legal analysts to make passing jests in relation to the obscure theories of one, Carl Schmitt. Agamben was effectively born in response to the fraternal habits of right-wing Law students at Yale. What is held as paragon within Critical Theory effectively just prevents people from taking what associations a person could make between Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations and a set of conspiracy theories concerning The Illuminati too far. To invoke the actual art movement of Absurdism, what I think that Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi calls to light is that authority is actually quite ridiculous. What is tragic of this, however, is that we are not up against a clever, clandestine, and decadent evil, but, rather, a set of half-baked political machinations that are ultimately kind of low. There would be poetry in the grand quest for liberation were we to up against a theatrical mastermind. There is no poetry is the attempt to counter what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil", a cynical and hypocritical reign of schadenfreude and other thought-terminating clichés.

I should also like to point out that, as much as I like Giorgio Agamben and think of him as an intellectual heir to the Situationist International, I think that there's a certain bitter irony to his life and work, which may have resulted from a failure to assess what happened to the Situationist International on his part. They originally set out to liberate the art world from the form of social control that it had established. They later became a living caricature of a clandestine spy ring. Agamben has stated that Walter Benjamin was the "antidote" that let him survive Martin Heidegger. He later became as a philosopher king. It is precisely the pretense which led Heidegger to support the Third Reich that Agamben later came to embody for the Left.

Though my somewhat troubled political history, I have kind of done something similar. Originally, I was operating under the assumption that the intelligence community, primarily the Central Intelligence Agency, a set of factions within MI6, and set of people to have come out of the Gehlen Organization in Germany, was primarily responsible for the development of the political project of Neo-Fascism and, therefore, most of the Western political plights, that is, of course, if you don't consider for the Russian Federation to be a Western nation. By thinking about the intelligence community for kind of an extensive period of time, I became subject to a certain pathology that eventually resulted in that I became as a living caricature of a spy. The fixation upon a set of political adversaries, often, at best, only those who are so responsible for whatever it is that has gone wrong in a person's life or mind, paradoxically results in that you come to an odd kind of similarity with them. It's how self-fulfilling prophecy functions.

Anyways, what I celebrate of Debord's political and philosophical legacy is his theory of The Spectacle. It is often assumed that The Spectacle is merely the mass media, which is a way of interpreting it, but I think that it would be better to take it for the entire political foray. In the late 1960s, due to the emergent popularity of Pacifism, there became what people call "the battle for hearts and minds". So as to highlight another political paradox, Richard Bartlett Gregg developed a concept for what he called "moral jiu-jitsu" in The Power of Nonviolence. He theorized that Pacifists had the upper hand in any political dispute because of that they had the moral highground. This idea was later incorporated within the Hippie movement and the notable martial historical curiosity of The First Earth Battalion. The hippie's strategy of utilizing experimental psychology so as to bring an end to the Vietnam War could be cited as what had driven The Weather Underground mad and The First Earth Battalion later became American psychological operations, what people generally call "PSYWAR". Though I, admittedly, haven't read Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, I would suggest that Robert Jay Lifton's analysis of totalitarian psychological warfare relying upon what he called "thought-terminating clichés" to be to the point. What I suspect of The Spectacle is that it can be characterized as a kind of diffuse psychological warfare, though often limited by the legal prohibition against political coercion and that most people would prefer to celebrate a genuine life of the mind, and that, what is not tenable of contemporary politics is that people have become convinced of that, in order to counter the form of authoritarianism that is created out of a kind of cult pathology in believing in the necessity of psychological warfare, they should engage in it. It's why politics is so often characterized by thoughtless sloganeering and condescending appeals to a rather mythic mass. Information warfare, something that radically differs from what people could believe for our beloved free press to be, is the master's tool. The various classes who put it to use in their various attempts to secure and retain power is the master's house. The classes differ, but I would suggest that this is as true as it is in the United States as it was in the former Soviet Union.

To return to the original question posed in regards to change and individual liberty, I would suggest that there is a certain irony to Conservatism in that they originally set out to cultivate a way of life that they believe to be virtuous and that, in the process of attempting to retain the form of control that they secured so as to set this out, they invariably have created a socio-political, intellectual, and cultural climate that is nothing but hypocritical, cynical, and evidently corrupt. From Silvio Berlusconi to Donald J. Trump, it is nothing but all too readily apparent that the reactionary attempt to retain Conservative ruling orders by what, through a kind of botched pragmatism, has resulted in the form of "mob rule" that they pathologically fear.

How I think that political strategists develop machinations such as the presidency of either Berlusconi or Trump is that, at some point in their life, they had a vision for the world that they wanted to create, which, in the beaten process of bringing into fruition, they had somehow rationalized and justified its antithesis. As much as I appreciate and even have a gift for irony, particularly that which is dramatic, what, within a political context, is it other than to make light of any apparent hypocrisy? The Right tends to believe that politicians should be men who are worthy of respect. The two of them that I can name were Hans Scholl and Leszek Kołakowski. I, myself, am an Anarcho-Pacifist, but do think it rather cultish of the Anarchist movement to define Anarchy as the "abolition of all hierarchy". It's a way for them to absolve themselves of that there are people who do take on leadership roles, and often not well. It's also a way to skirt the charge of a certain degree of recalcitrance. Seeing that we don't live within a theoretical utopian society in the distant future, I acknowledge that, within any given social or political situation, there are people who are leaders and they ought to be worthy of respect. Though I am sort of a postmodern ethos that deconstructs the history of so-called "great men", I must admit that I do kind of long to see the day when these ostensive natural-born leaders become willing to engage within the difficult tasks from which a genuine Liberal democracy could be born.

That's kind of a lengthy cultural critique and I feel like I haven't quite answered your question.

How would you view the necessity of change which is often aimed at increasing individual liberty? — Levon Nurijanyan

I think that, at least, tacitly everyone, which is to say everyone who has a say in such matters, agrees to that we ought to let the world become as liberal as it can. Everyone who isn't engaged in some sort of political scheme or another, and there are right-wing intellectuals who are included within this "everyone", assumes that the democratic project ought to be undertaken so as to maximize liberty. True Conservatives tend to be concerned with the practicality of how this can be meaningfully effectuated. What people don't understand about the term, "reactionary", is that it was created to describe people who have no interest in doing this whatsoever and are merely clinging to what somewhat illusory power they have by more or less every means that are deemed to be necessary.

I am of a kind of "nihilistic optimism". I believe that freedom proliferates by its expression alone. To wax spiritual, I almost believe within a grand serendipitous project for the common liberation of all of humanity. When I consider my political experience, however, it often seems to me that, regardless as to what anyone does, only so much will ever substantially change. I am almost so inclined to suggest that. three-hundred years from now, we will finally recover from the aristocratic co-option of the Liberal democratic project and the distorted utopianism of more or less every totalitarian ideology, and a genuine Liberal democratic project will be finally established. In seven-hundred years, we could even see an ethical and equitable participatory democracy. I am only so hopeful, however.

What I think that everyone has to understand, in order to disengage from the spectacular battle for hearts and minds, however, is the world just becomes how it naturally does with or without you and will become all the more better should you, and I as well, let go of control and just let it be.