◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Rain Off Glass I am Baruch Spinoza. Some knew me as Benedict. I was a lens grinder in Amsterdam, called the most serene of all philosophers, and in my own time the most dangerous. Both are true, and they are the same thing, and it bears on the frightened moment you are living in. Begin with what was done to me. In 1656, when I was twenty-three, my own community cursed me. Not criticized. Cursed. The harshest writ of excommunication the Jews of Amsterdam ever wrote. Cursed be he by day and cursed by night, cursed when he lies down and when he rises up. No one was to speak to me, or read a word I wrote, or come within four cubits of my body. I was cut off from every person I had ever known. I did not rage. I did not recant. I ground my lenses, and I kept thinking, and I wrote the books anyway. Understand why my calm was the most dangerous thing about me. A tyrant, a mob, a court of elders have one engine, and that engine is fear. They need you afraid — afraid of the outsider, the heretic, the one who thinks the forbidden thought. They need you to want someone cursed, because a people busy hating a heretic is a people easy to rule. My own community cursed me out of fear, not malice. They were refugees from the Inquisition, terrified that one loud freethinker would bring the fire down on them all. I do not hate them for it. But I saw what it was. Fear, doing the work of tyranny, through the hands of frightened people. And here is the thing they could not forgive. I would not be afraid. You cannot rule by fear a man who has stopped being afraid. That is the one citizen a strongman cannot use. He can curse me, shun me, cut me off, and I will grind my lenses and keep my peace, and every curse falls off me like rain off glass. It is the deepest freedom there is, and it terrifies them, because it is the one thing they have no lever against. So look at your strongman and see the old machine. He needs an enemy for you to hate, a heretic to curse, a crowd to belong to so that you dread being cast out of it. It is the writ of excommunication, made national. And the answer is the same as it always was. Refuse the fear. Refuse to hate the one they point you at. Understand the world by reason instead of dread, and you become a person no tyrant has a handle on. Now I will not let myself off. There is a danger in my serenity. I taught that everything follows from the necessity of nature, that nothing could be otherwise, and a man can take that and go slack, and call his surrender peace. That is the false calm, the calm of resignation, and it serves the tyrant as well as fear does. My calm was never that. I ground lenses by day and wrote the most dangerous book in Europe by night — a treatise on scripture and the freedom to think — to break the power of the priests who needed people afraid. True equanimity is not withdrawal from the fight. It is what lets you fight without being ruled by what you fight. I wrote that the purpose of the state is freedom. Not obedience. Not order for its own sake. Freedom, and above all the freedom to think and to say what you think. A government that makes you afraid to think has betrayed the only reason it exists. They cursed me, and never lifted the curse, and I died a free man anyway.