“Force is that which makes a thing of whoever submits to it. Exercised to the extreme, it makes the human being a thing quite literally, that is, a dead body. Someone was there and, the next moment, no one …
“How much more varied in operation, how much more stunning in effect, is that other sort of force, that which does not kill, or rather does not kill just yet … From the power to change a human being into a thing by making him die there comes another power, in its way more monstrous, that of making a still living being into a thing …
“As pitilessly as force annihilates, equally without pity it intoxicates those who possess or believe they possess it. In reality, no one possesses it.”
— Simone Weil, The Iliad or The Poem of Force
While the tyranny of force dismays our hearts, distracting our attentions with its presumptuous swagger, it leaves a powerful omission behind. The dense and mindless mission of a forceful delusion only has eyes in the front of its head. Cutting through the waves of humanity, standing at the prow, force calculates delusion. Thinking it leaves the conquered in its trail, or has eradicated the promiscuous authenticities of even one single human mind, it forgets. It neglects. It emboldens itself while, unconscious of any notion that it’s rampage built its fabulous conquest on the absence of life rather than the abundance of it. It roots itself in the lifeless residual, depending on its breadth, not its depth, for stability. It defaces the surface, leaving the sap of its subjugates strengthening their subterranean roots. Overlaying its depthless subsection, it obversely enriches its subjects with the more powerful art of submission. Yielding to the obscenities of its enforcer, authentic human life, being in no need of external oversight, grows, silently more confident in its own credible heredity.
Empires and tyrants die with their own visions of supremacy, but the insuppressible divergence of humanity prevails by default, nurtured by power, not force, intrinsic to its own mysterious nature.
Amen.