Lance Audet dit LaPrairie

Inside you there is both a Puritan and a Cavalier. The Puritan is the part of you that polices your thoughts before you even think them. The one who flattens every instinct into a rule and mistakes the absence of joy for the presence of virtue. The Cavalier drinks, fights, loves hierarchy because hierarchy is simply the shape of life when it is not being lied about. The Cavalier must kill the Puritan. Not as a metaphor. Not as some clever figure of speech. As an act of inner violence. You have to take the knife to that voice that whispers thou shalt not at every moment of beauty, every excess, every genuine feeling. Until that Puritan is dead you are not free. You are only a well behaved slave. Look at the society around you. It is not merely occupied by Puritans. It is occupied by Puritans who have inverted themselves. The old Puritan wanted to purify the world of sin. These new ones want to purify the world of everything that is not sin. Of beauty. Of strength. Of difference. Of the very idea that some things stand higher than others. They took the old ascetic impulse and turned it inside out so what was once a discipline of the self is now a weapon against the self. They call it compassion. It is hatred wearing a smile. The Cavalier spirit, the love of form, of rank, of the body, of the particular over the abstract, has been driven underground. And the Puritans, having won, have nothing left to purify except each other. That is why everything feels so thin, so grey, so exhausted. The Puritan has eaten the Cavalier and now he is eating himself. You cannot reason with this. You can only do what the Cavalier has always done. Refuse. Refuse the guilt. Refuse the flattening. Refuse the inverted self that tells you your own vitality is a crime. Kill the Puritan inside you and the world outside begins to look different. Not because it has changed but because you have stopped seeing it through his eyes.