State, Wild, Art - manifesto

 

🔻 MANIFESTO I: The State is Static

We are born free. We are born wild.

But from our first breath, we are taught to obey. To adapt. To conform.

The State, so-called because it is static, was meant to organize collective life. But it has calcified into a machine that serves its own existence. It extracts value. It demands tribute. It punishes non-participation.

We work to earn a currency we did not create, to pay taxes to a structure we did not choose. If we do not comply, we are criminalized. This is not freedom. It is sanctioned exploitation.

Every nation, no matter its philosophy or political brand, shares this underlying form:

• It feeds itself before it feeds the people.

• It promises safety, but delivers surveillance.

• It offers structure, but demands obedience.

There is no true outside to it.

All the livable land is spoken for.

To opt out is to exile oneself to desert, ice, or marginal space.

And yet we are told this is civilization.

That without it, there would be chaos.

But what if the chaos we fear is only the ungoverned wildness of being?

What if we do not need to be governed, only trusted?

We acknowledge the necessity of cooperation.

But we reject the permanence of coercion.

The future does not belong to the static.

It belongs to the adaptive, the fluid, the wild, the awake.

Let us begin to imagine again.

Systems that serve, not rule.

Structures that change as we change.

Communities built on consent, not compliance.

🔺 MANIFESTO II: The Artist as the Wild Core

Art is the expression of what remains alive in us.

Not the polished performance, but the raw pulse beneath it.

It is the scream behind the smile.

The dream beneath the job title.

The soul that never adapted.

We are taught to wear masks.

To bury our instincts in utility.

To trade creation for productivity.

But somewhere within us, the wild core survives.

Art is its voice.

In a world ruled by systems, art is resistance.

It refuses to be measured.

It refuses to be taxed.

It tells the truth even when language breaks.

The artist is not merely a maker of things.

The artist is a witness. A mirror. A wound-bearer. A prophet.

Art does not seek permission.

It does not beg for relevance.

It emerges because it must.

To create is to reclaim our agency.

To feel is to defy numbness.

To share is to spark revolution.

Where the State limits,

Art expands.

Where society demands masks,

Art peels them off.

Where the world is static,

Art is movement.

We believe in art as the practice of being fully alive.

We do not serve the market.

We serve the truth inside us.

And through that service,

we serve something greater than any nation, law, or system.

🔻 MANIFESTO III: We Adapt to Survive

We are not blank slates.

We are wild beings, alive, feeling, knowing.

But to survive, we adapt.

What we adapt to is not neutral. It is a matrix of pressures. Some loving, some broken, some coercive, all shaping.

1. The Parental Influence

We are shaped first by those who birthed us

but they, too, were shaped by the systems before us.

We inherit not just genes, but wounds.

Parental love is real, but often filtered through exhaustion, trauma, survival.

We adapt to approval. We adapt to rejection.

In this dance, we learn to betray parts of ourselves just to be loved.

2. The Local Community

Then comes the village, the religion, the neighborhood, the feed.

• Belief systems are handed down like heirlooms.

• Norms dictate what is acceptable to feel, say, be.

• Social media amplifies this, becoming the new village square where shame is public and performance is constant.

We adapt to visibility.

We adapt to belonging-by-sameness.

We learn to shape ourselves for the group, even when it costs us our truth.

3. The State

Beneath and above it all is the State, the architecture of authority.

• It teaches us through schooling, often colonial, hierarchical, compliance-based.

• It governs our time and movement through law and policy.

• It demands payment for our right to exist in society.

We adapt to surveillance.

We adapt to paperwork.

We adapt to power-over.

🧬 The Cost of Adaptation

In adapting to all of this,

we often lose touch with our wild core,

our instinct, our depth, our creativity, our sovereignty.

But adaptation is not identity.

It is a response to pressure, not the source of power.

We reclaim ourselves when we remember:

• Not all inherited beliefs are truths.

• Not all authority is wisdom.

• Not all belonging is worth the cost.

🌱 Toward Conscious Adaptation

We cannot always escape what shaped us.

But we can become conscious of it.

We can choose to adapt by awareness, not just survival.

• Question the parent-voice in your head.

• Deconstruct the community values that stifle you.

• Dismantle the idea that legality equals morality.

We adapt to survive.

But we must create to live.

Let us choose what to keep 

and what to cast off.

Let us reclaim our wild.

Let us become again.