Dead Water - Claude.ai
There are two ways to know you are a ruler.
The first is to look at those who look at you with hope. The second is to look at those who look at you with fear. In the first case, you serve the people. In the second, the people serve you. The difference is ontological: two different conceptions of what a human being is.
Every power has its own theology—its own idea of the sacred. One considers the living human being sacred. The other considers the order, the system, the hierarchy sacred, a system in which a person is merely an element, a cog, expendable material.
A society that is unable or unwilling to see its poor, its peripheral people, its "superfluous" ones—at the moment of crisis suddenly finds them very useful. Useful precisely in their readiness to die. Because those who didn't particularly want to live—or didn't particularly have a place to live—more readily agree to die where dying is unwanted.
Psychologists know: a person who has long felt invisible sometimes seeks death not out of despair, but from a strange desire to finally be noticed. An obituary is the first time they write about you.
And the person goes. Not because they are stupid. But because they are hungry. Truly hungry—not by bread alone.
The word—especially the poetic word, especially the living word—kills the illusion. It destroys the picture of the world in which everything is properly arranged, everyone is in their place, and the ruler meets with the right people on the right day.
The poet is dangerous for such a system ontologically: he reminds us that reality is larger than what is permitted to be seen.
Suicide—in psychology—is always a paradox: a person destroys themselves in an attempt to save something or prove something. Sometimes—in an attempt to punish others. Sometimes—in an attempt to escape the unbearable. But in any case, it is an act in which destruction is accepted as a way out.
When an entire state, an entire civilizational construct, moves according to this logic—destroying the most living part of itself in order to preserve dead forms of power—that is collective suicide. Not a metaphor. A diagnosis.
The dead is fear, hierarchy, secrecy, the cult of force, the conviction that the life of another person is a resource.
When the dead devours the living—the organism dies. This is true for a cell, for a person, for a people.
