"Can a free man be a slave?"

Neurosis deepens as we retract into ourselves. Selfishness compounds parochialism, inspires boredom, and entrenches guilt. The majority of us are born innocent, raised to believe guilt is both ubiquitous and innate, and approach death filled with fear and self-loathing. Neurotic, guilt ridden individuals - eager to obey, yearning to be accepted - are easier to govern and, possibly, to manipulate. Inquiring minds, set to challenge and contend, are naturally more difficult to deal with. However, as Kant implies, an enlightened person is occupied with problems beyond the individual by requisite. Enlightenment permits a perspective outside of the self. Slavish guilt constrains the individual within the confines of a psychic enclosure.

Kant lucidly expressed an ambiguity between political stability and enlightenment. Even the enlightened despot - and luminous figure in Kant's "What is Enlightenment?" - Frederick the Great lamented, on his deathbed, that he was "tired of ruling slaves". The vibrancy of a society, driven by the discourse among its citizens, cannot be seen as being mutually exclusive from its viability. Slaves, as it were, are only as efficacious as their leader allows them to be. Thoughtful and "enlightened" citizens, however, remain unconstrained - to a certain extent.

But what constitutes a slave? This, of course, poses an important yet oft-avoided question in political thought, "Can a free man be a slave?" In a kingdom of unsaid depravity, a free man cannot recognize his chains.

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Sketching an end to meaninglessness

Sketching an end for a meaningless world. When the Creator departs, is there anything left?

He dreamt unconscionable dreams. He slid into forbidden spaces, escaped just as easily. He flew, soaring impossibly. He ran with perpetual speed. The Creator was gone. He now ruled all.

Night. I turned to meet my wife’s trembling eyes, elated and afraid. The covers lift, revealing lost glory. Home, gone again. “Are you gone?” she asked. “I’m gone.”

He sat at the bottom of his darkened domicile, brooding about his ineluctable fate. Atop his throne of soda pop cans, he fumed silently like a child – inwardly frustrated by ordained limits. His eyes scanned an abandoned kingdom, his kingdom of one. The key was hidden away; escape remained impossible.

The plastic owl hooted thirteen o’clock: feeding time. He climbed into the den to mete out the lion’s share. The beast mustered a weak growl and crawled towards his “master”. He poured a box of dry grain into the troft and turned on the water. The lion ate like swine, approaching, with every half-hearted bite, a forcible satisfaction. “Be happy with what you are given,” the king of desolation told his pet, “you will never know when it’ll be gone.”

He made his way out of the den, haunted by obsolete visions of colour. Colour. Colour perplexed. It caused undue ambiguity, puzzling complexity. Colour, sacrificed for the possibility of happiness, was phenomenon foreign to his desolate kingdom. Imagined variegated hues and vibrant shades aroused painful visions of his absent Queen. Colour, hence, was banished.

The king’s routine stroll ended at his greenhouse. The wide variety of plant life did not interest him – they merely fed caged husbandry and provided satiation for his infrequent cravings of vegetations. At the centre of the greenhouse stood a towering tree, stretching to the unseen top of his kingdom. Even though it grew voraciously, day after day – threatening to imperceptibly puncture the celestial barrier of this kingdom of one - neither foliage nor fruit was bourn from its barren branches.

Concluding another stroll through artificial darkness, the king retired to his familiar desolate quarters. It was there, on this occasion, when he spotted the bottle of Absinthe out of the labyrinth of wreckage and woe.

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