“Hope” is a word that can inadvertently tie you to a society that forced you to hope in the first place, and “discipline” can act the same way. I would say that I currently have “discipline” in a technical sense, but I don’t think of it as such, or as a chore. I naturally do what is necessary. I don’t need to have some adherence to abstract discipline, as I own the meaning that the discipline serves. When I am excited to claim the world as something I can transform, I can have technical “discipline” without the sense of self-flagellation. That is because my life is anchored in the right orientation and set of principles. Something more than honoring a vague sense of discipline ignites me to take action.

I can see my orientation as having a constant pathway into life. If for a second I lack an entry point, I know how to seek it out and find it. The principles give me that urgency. What before appeared as tortuous, laborious, time-consuming discipline when the effort was in service of someone else’s meaning, now evades that sense of labor and eclipses the oppression of time. My own personal meaning fills in the space that prior could only be felt as alienated labor, or as time slowly ticking under another’s control and command.

Discipline is a means. If you are browbeaten into having discipline, but you cannot so clearly own the end-goal those means serve, then you’re living someone else’s fantasy. These means have been perverted into ends prior to transcending the current order’s logic. You are in a closed loop of “discipline” that only reacts to power. I don’t need hope when I can claim my own present in alignment with principles, because I see my moment now, as much as any other period, as something to act on.

Here, or in the future, life being claimed in the moment is an act to transform what’s around you. Now, like in the future, I can claim life at its highest expression by reaching my hands into the world and attempting to remold it. If you allow yourself to love that process, you do not need to self-flagellate, even when you are working strenuously.

Now, part of being in society is that, yes, we will have to make sacrifices. That is much different than a structured form of politics where you are told to be disciplined, but not allowed say over what the discipline is in service of. You will be better off claiming the world as something you permit yourself to act on. Assessing the sacrifice that comes with being in society also comes easier when you feel to be yourself a part of it, and claim a role in it. You will, at least, sacrifice in relation to something you love, and not something you feel is only imposed on you.

When ML cults pop up and tell you to have discipline, It’s because they want to objectify you and instrumentalize you. They want you to be a pure instrument, and so they demand you obsess over your function, while asking you to leave meaning beyond function to your superiors. They’ll say that revolution has already been worked out ahead of time. All that’s left for you is to become an instrument in the hands of leaders. In this, purpose, meaning, and principles, in fact communism, are stolen from would-be revolutionaries, barred from becoming acts of self-conscious self-creation.

Do not let people browbeat you with calls to adhere to an abstract sense of discipline without clarifying what the discipline is in service of. You are always better off figuring that out yourself, on a path to or within collective struggle, and applying yourself where social action allows you to live out your principles, in a shared objective in collective society. There will be various points a collective pursuit will leave open for you to find meaning, and discover where personal and collective seamlessly hinge.

And, the fact is, there is no space of non-enjoyment. If abstract discipline becomes your life, you will enjoy it. You will enjoy being an object, and those who objectify you will enjoy their domination over your life. Your two sides will unconsciously enjoy a disavowed reality, and together you will cut yourselves off from the consciousness that would allow transformation.

Those who whip themselves as a matter of ritual enjoy it, and find meaning in it, and this meaning in self-flagellation blocks transcendence. We don’t want to give our meaning to dumb, empty, abstract notions like discipline without them being subordinated to higher meaning. We want those means to serve an end, and we want to live in a space that can be free of delusion.