Of Human Bondage

Spinoza was excommunicated at twenty-three. The decree issued by the Amsterdam synagogue in 1656 is one of the most severe in recorded Jewish history — they used the harshest language available, condemned him "with all the curses written in the Book of the Law," and ordered that "no one should communicate with him, neither in writing nor accord him any favor nor stay with him under the same roof nor come within four cubits in his vicinity." They never said why. We do not know what he had done, or said, or thought, that made him so dangerous. We only know that whatever it was, he had done it by twenty-three.

He went home and wrote the Ethics.

I have been thinking about a passage from Part IV, Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions. The title alone stops me every time I encounter it. Bondage. Strength. These are words we use carefully, or should.

Here is how Spinoza opens it:

Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage: for, when a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse.

He wrote this in 1677. He has described the present moment with clinical precision.

The Ethics is organized geometrically — propositions, proofs, corollaries, like a mathematical treatise. Most people who encounter it find this strange, even alienating. Why would you write ethics like a math textbook? Why force a reader to follow a proof rather than simply feel moved by an argument?

I think the form is the argument. To read the Ethics is to practice something: the discipline of following a chain of reasoning rather than being carried by an affect. It is anti-brainrot in its structure before it is anti-brainrot in its content.

The content:

Every thing strives. This is Spinoza's foundational claim. Each entity — a stone, a body, a mind, a community — has what he calls a conatus, a drive to persist in its own being.

Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being. (Ethics III, Proposition 6)

The effort by which everything endeavors to persist in its own being is nothing else than the actual essence of the thing in question. (Ethics III, Proposition 7)

The striving is not incidental. It is not a feature. It is the thing itself. What you are is what you are trying to be.

Now here is where it becomes difficult.

We can be made to strive against our own nature. We can be moved by external causes — passions, affects, forces we do not understand and did not choose — so that we persist, yes, but we persist as something we are not. We keep going. But what keeps going is not us.

Spinoza calls this bondage. Not metaphorically. Technically. A person in bondage is not free not because they are caged, but because the causes of their actions are outside them. The algorithm that keeps you scrolling is not a cage. But it moves you from the outside. It is not your conatus expressing itself. It is someone else's conatus — the platform's, the engineer's, the advertiser's — expressing itself through you.

Most people in this condition know something is wrong. They can see the better option. They follow the worse one anyway. Spinoza noted this. He did not have a word for it except bondage.

The way out, he says, is not willpower. Willpower is another affect, and affects fight each other without resolution. The way out is understanding:

An emotion, which is a passion, ceases to be a passion, as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea thereof. (Ethics V, Proposition 3)

This is the move that matters. The moment you understand the mechanism of what moves you — not abstractly, not as a slogan, but actually see it, follow the chain, hold the clear idea — the affect changes character. It does not disappear. It becomes something you participate in rather than something you are subjected to.

This is what Brainrot Research is, if it is anything. Not a warning. A practice of forming clear and distinct ideas about what moves us. Naming the mechanism. Following the chain.

Spinoza died at forty-four — lung disease, probably aggravated by glass dust from the lenses he spent his life grinding. He had refused the academic appointments, the royal patronage, the financial security that arrived, eventually, in the form of a pension from a Dutch aristocrat he liked. He kept grinding the lenses. He kept working on the Ethics.

It was published after his death, by friends who knew they were taking a risk. Most of Europe's major thinkers immediately called it the most dangerous book ever written.

It was not dangerous. It was the opposite of danger. It was someone showing you, proposition by proposition, how to be your own master.