Part 1 – Fire and Water
Hobbes thought of politics like a jungle, but I’ve always preferred to think of it like the sea. When we were born into the world we were birthed into flows of time and found ourselves alone aboard a derelict ship, thrown into a situation we never asked to be in. In this way life is absurd: we desire to find a meaning to our thrown-ness, but only squint into inky darkness and find an abyss: but “if you gaze into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” This is where Mohamed Bouazizi found himself on December 17th, 2010 when in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia he was harassed by the police for not having a permit to sell vegetables from his street-side cart. Harassment had been a regular thing since Mohamed was a child: police would continuously confiscate his small wheelbarrow, slap him, spit on him and insult him. But Mohamed had no other way to make money, and so he continued to sell vegetables in the street, rising early to begin work at 8 am every day. One day, it became too much for him and he publicly committed suicide. One of his sisters’ spoke of him, saying: “What kind of repression do you imagine it takes for a young man to do this? A man who has to feed his family by buying goods on credit when they fine him ... and take his goods. In Sidi Bouzid, those with no connections and no money for bribes are humiliated and insulted and not allowed to live.” In the wake of this suicide agencies like Fox News have attempted to frame Bouazizi as a “rioter” or a “looter”, ascribing to him a meaning that he never meant to take on himself.
Paul Rahe tells us on January 3rd, 2012
(Paul A., Jan. 3, “Mad as Hell: From the US to Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Moscow”, http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Mad-as-Hell-From-the-US-to-Tunisia-Egypt-Libya-Syria-and-Moscow, [CL])
Bouazizi wanted two things: … … corruption and petty tyranny.
The nature of Bouazizi’s act as a public expression isn’t a solitary suicide but instead implicates all of us in his anxiety: the revolutions themselves began with his act of self destruction, and thus the root of the topic finds itself inextricably entwined with the question of suicide. His self-immolation represents a question of not just suicide, but the logic of murder as violence against the self. Destiny finds us in meaninglessness: it’s impossible to determine the difference between a choice and a coin flip. But to mirror the ethics of the coin is to become the grand architects of violence, and to answer the abyss with suicide is to welcome the Great Silence.
Camus explains in The Rebel:
(Albert Camus, 1956, “The Rebel”, pg. 4-8, [CL])
God is deceitful; … … earth are annihilated.
Part 2 – Slums and the Eternal City
The second choice we have when we meet the gaze of reality is the Revolt: the choice to be overcome with nihilism but to continue to struggle anyway. In Greek myth, Prometheus tricks Zeus into giving up sacrificial meat for the good of man. In punishment, Zeus takes fire back into Olympus and leaves men in the dark. Prometheus chooses to rebel and steals fire, hiding it in a giant fennel stalk and delivering it to humanity in the night. His choice to renounce indifference to suffering reveals rebellion as an act of love that eventually chains him to the mountain, every day being eaten alive by a vulture. His eternal suffering is his destiny, but his revolt is to shout “never!” when the vulture descends, to rattle his chains and struggle against the inevitable and to defy Zeus as an expression of compassion for man. This means choosing to be exhausted masses without God.
Camus again:
(Albert Camus, 1956, “The Rebel”, 303-306, [CL])
Finally, it is those … … destiny of all men.
[Here we have an advocacy statement. It changes from round to round, but usually includes an argument about a bifurcation between the choice to defer existential anxiety and the choice to revolt, symbolized by the ballots choice to empty status quo metanarratives of their meaning.]
In the 1980’s villagers in the Andes were at the center of an uprising of the Shining Path. The Peruvian military reacted by repressing the villagers and establishing vigilante peasants to counter the threat. At the end of the conflict, NGOs and government organizations flooded the area with democracy assistance programs. The new discourses of democracy breeded by this apparatus framed the villagers as passive victims, but the Andeans chose to organize themselves and pressed institutions to channel reconstruction money into tangible structures like roads, markets, and running water rather than into planning workshops and seminars. These are subjects of democracy that constitute themselves on its failure. Rather than become cynical and give up on democracy, they demanded the real thing and refused to let their hope for a bright future of living become banalized. The Andeans became masses without God, finding joy in the infinite failed labor of democracy. At the meridian of democracy assistance they refused to deify development and to instead labor infinitely in the failure of the human condition as shared struggle.
Santi Tafarella describes the revolt in 2009:
(Santi Tafarella, Teacher of Literature and Writing at Antelope Valley College, California, 2009, “Albert Camus: The Absurd, Rebellion, Freedom, and Solidarity”, [CL])
Here’s Albert Camus … … to justify it.
The 1AC is resolved against the world: to will against something that we have no power over. To refuse to drift along the ideological currents of Destiny and to fight against the undertow, knowing our struggle is endless and futile. To tread the waters of democracy, to hollow out and occupy subjectivity and fight against the rising of the sun; we fight with windmills. In this way the project of democracy assistance becomes our Sisyphean burden.
Camus again, this time in The Plague:
(Albert Camus, 1948, “The Plague”, Pg. 117-8, [CL])
Tarrou squared his shoulders … … The reply came promptly: "Suffering.”
So why vote, go to work, protest, or revolt? Why democracy?
Because we can. Because we MUST.
We seek to expand our reach as far as possible. Democracy is always a question of who we include, of how far we can expand the borders of egalitarian value. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that acts like Mohamed’s self-immolation began with nothing but a heart-rending cry for help in the struggle against injustice. Those left out of globalization like Bouazizi suffer from the frustration of being in the economic in-between. We have to democratize the notion of struggle by expanding revolt to those who fall through the cracks: to the every-day person on the street who stares down the hopeless abyss to let them know that they are not alone.
This is “First to realize not verbally but in your heart, in your blood, in your whole thinking, that human beings right through the world go through the same agonies that one goes through: the loneliness, the despair, the depressions, the extraordinary uncertainty, insecurity, whether they live ten thousand miles away or two thousand miles or here, they are all psychologically bound together. If one realizes that profoundly in your guts, in your blood, in your heart, in your mind, then you are responsible.”
Ashley Woodward writes in 2011:
(“Camus and Nihilism”, SOPHIA, Springer Science+Business Media B.V., 2011, [CL])
While Nietzsche arguably… … philosophical justification of murder
If time remains we sometimes read extra cards on the bottom. This obviously depends upon the team.
