All the police establishments in operation today have been designed to combat the systematic resistance of a minority capable of concerted action informed by a philosophical system. The working class has indeed been organized negatively into a complement of itself. Every attempt to reconstruct a system of thought capable of overpowering the established forces is ever more likely to fail in view of the odds. But the police establishment is powerless against the random resistance in an interdependent world, where it is increasingly impossible to estimate the consequences of specific actions, since such consequences tend to spread too far and wide. Such resistance must not be guided by systematic thought, which is highly susceptible to the available methods of control. On the contrary, the random acts of resistance must arise from a spontaneous realization of individuals that every step closer to the administered world is bound to bring us a step closer to an impasse that no one will be capable of bridging, where even an occasional malfunction of a system’s component will have been taken into account as a given.

Random thought is an exercise in restlessness. All that remains after so many valiant theoretical systems are fragments. A multitude of fragments awaiting a miracle. But before these residua could be matched again, for we must still allow for this unlikely possibility, they must be broken down even further. They must be mixed thoroughly. No structure must remain, for it can only misguide. The atomization and randomization of residua…

Ignorance—or better, uncertainty—is tolerable as long as every certainty threatens to enslave. This is not a position, a principle, or a threat to those who disagree, but an expression of hope, an expression of blind resistance. To ask for more is to cater to the animal spirits, to the uncertainty aversion that contains nothing but an irrational fear of what looks like a predicament affording no obvious escape. This instinct can always generate new excreta that preserve order for the sake of order. There are many such attempts nowadays. There is no reason to envy their bewildered authors, however, nor to envy the certainty with which the Stalinists and the Trotskyists used to manufacture new theories for the sake of the anxious. It would be like envying the neighbor’s dog for its comfortable life beside a dish of canned food and a leash.

Addendum I (April 1, 1983)

I take the first subject that chance offers. They are all equally good to me. And I never plan to develop them completely. For I do not see the whole of anything; nor do those who promise to show it to us. Of a hundred members and faces that each thing has, I take one, sometimes only to lick it, sometimes to brush the surface, sometimes to pinch it to the bone. I give it a stab, not as wide but as deep as I know how. And most often I like to take them from some unaccustomed point of view. I would venture to treat some matter thoroughly, if I knew myself less well. Scattering a word here, there another, samples separated from their context, dispersed, without a plan and without a promise, I am not bound to make something of them or to adhere to them myself without varying when I please and giving myself up to doubt and uncertainty and my ruling quality, which is ignorance.

From Montaigne’s Complete Essays, translated by Donald M. Frame, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1958, p. 219

Addendum II (September 5, 2016)

Another stroke of genius, no doubt. The title of this piece fills me with joy to this day. The first addendum only adds to my merriment, for Montaigne was undoubtedly a kindred soul. Even though I was focusing on Yugoslavia and the Soviet orbit when I wrote the original piece, it applies to the so-called west equally well. With respect to police establishments of all descriptions, socialism and capitalism differ but little. Come to think of it, feudalism half a millennium earlier was not far behind, either. Back then, the church hardly differed from secret police. Returning to the gist of the original piece, it is amazing that many of my current ideas have such deep roots, and in my own writing. Atomization and randomization of thought ultimately lead to abandonment of all thought, and at will. Alleluia! Alas, it has taken me almost exactly half of my life to come to that staggering conclusion. Be that as it may, now I feel my feet firmly on the ground. In the end, liberation amounts to liberation from thought.