Against the Robots

Creon divides his interlocutors into two camps: those who are with him and those who are against him. He no longer negotiates and threatens those who oppose him. Force controls him, when force should only ever be used for protection, and this is always the case for those who surrender body and soul to the will to power. To wield force as power is to believe that fear is the driving force of power and establishes authority, when in reality it is more akin to a parent's caress on a child's cheek after a misdeed. If power reigns in practice, it must always be tempered with authority, or it will believe itself to be self-sufficient. Creon no longer knows where he is speaking from, or at least he is speaking of an imaginary place he has just arrived in, a place that did not exist before his arrival and that he created for himself. As if, upon becoming king, Creon were no longer composed of the same elements of flesh, bone, and genetics as the day before his coronation. Creon clings to and appropriates a royal identity that forgets his origins and his debt to his past, which is erased by his rise to power. While identity is a quest and, to some extent, a construct built upon one's tastes and choices, a whole foundation of identity exists, even pre-exists, within us before we are born. Too many identities are written these days, crystallizing upon this foundation or solely upon the search for it, when balance should be the guiding principle of identity.