Choose Life

“Choose Life” is a recurring imperative that turns the familiar language of individual choice into a demand for political action. In the book, choosing life does not mean settling for an ordinary routine; it means refusing submission to the Ownership Class, recognizing the structures that shape apparent freedom, and deciding whether to accept or resist the prevailing order.

The Expression and Its Immediate Sequence

“Choose Life” appears in a deliberately compressed sequence of commands: “Fuck ‘Em,” “Choose Life,” “Choose a Job,” and “Choose a fucking Revolution!” The progression moves from rejection, to affirmation, to the conventional social obligation of employment, and finally to revolutionary action. Its force comes from that collision. Life is not treated as a private possession detached from politics; the choice of a job and the choice of a revolution are placed within the same field of decision, with the latter presented as the more radical completion of the former.

The sequence also refuses the idea that conformity is neutral. “Choose a Job” evokes the ordinary path offered by capitalist society, while “Choose a fucking Revolution!” breaks the polite register of consumer choice and exposes the violence beneath it. The expression therefore functions less as advice than as a challenge: a person must decide whether to reproduce the existing arrangement or act against it.

Class Conflict and Manufactured Choice

The book places the expression inside a broader account of social domination. The world is described as ruled by the rich elite, the 1 percent, or the Ownership Class, whose central achievement is making the 99 percent carry out its wishes. The book explains this submission through the master–slave dialectic associated with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: one self-conscious being risks everything to seize power, while the other submits because survival matters more than victory. “Choose Life” enters this framework as a demand to stop confusing survival within domination with genuine freedom.

That demand is sharpened by the book’s claim that the American right is governed by false consciousness and has been persuaded to support the interests of the super-rich. The expression consequently carries an ideological meaning. To choose life is to choose awareness of the forces that organize work, wealth, political allegiance, and social obedience, rather than accepting elite power as the natural background of existence.

Revolution Against the Confederate Order

The expression is connected to the book’s historical and political argument that contemporary right-wing politics represents a continuation of the Confederacy. The Trump insurgency is described as “The Confederacy: The Sequel,” a return to rule based on racism, white supremacy, and ultra-plutocracy. Within that interpretation, revolution is not an abstract gesture but the necessary answer to a social order that protects concentrated wealth and treats human beings as instruments of profit.

The book contrasts this order with the Union’s use of positive liberty. Abraham Lincoln is presented as the president most identified with positive liberty because he used decisive state action to end slavery, accepting the Civil War as the inevitable consequence and pursuing the total defeat of the Confederacy. The same model is then projected onto the present: the expression’s revolution calls for the defeat not merely of a physical enemy but of the Confederate ideology as a mental and cultural formation.

This argument extends to the culture war, which the book defines as a conflict between Confederate culture, associated with the right wing and negative liberty, and Union culture, associated with the left wing and positive liberty. “Choose Life” therefore names a side in an imagined mental Civil War. Its choice is collective and institutional as well as personal: the desired outcome is a decisive Union victory over predatory capitalism and the political culture that sustains it.

From Individual Defiance to Collective Action

The expression also belongs to the book’s wider call for agency. The final movement toward revolution rejects waiting for rescue. In the book’s account of the approaching storm, heroes do not wait for saviors; they act, make things happen, change the world, and shape history. The Will to Power is described in the same active vocabulary: it does not wait, but flexes, acts, seizes the day, and shapes historical events.

This emphasis distinguishes “Choose Life” from a merely rhetorical celebration of freedom. Choice entails responsibility and consequences. The person who chooses a job enters the relations of capitalism; the person who chooses revolution accepts conflict with the structures that govern those relations. The expression thus converts freedom from a feeling into a practice, and from a private preference into a decision about the organization of society.

Cultural Awakening and the Final Horizon

The expression’s political imagination is reinforced by the discussion of John Carpenter’s They Live. That film is interpreted as a story in which a hidden elite engineers economic collapse, ruins the working class, and uses a subliminal signal to produce false consciousness. The special sunglasses reveal the propaganda and the invisible order beneath apparent freedom. The book emphasizes that Carpenter associated the aliens with yuppie followers of Ronald Reagan and unrestrained capitalism, not with Jewish control of the world.

Against this background, “Choose Life” resembles the act of removing the signal’s disguise. It asks readers to see the social mechanisms that have been presented as ordinary choice and then to act on that recognition. The book’s concluding revolutionary vision names the coming transformation the Dawn of the Jacobin Age and a worldwide revolution. The right wing’s decision to place a senior member of the 1 percent in the White House is treated as a strategic mistake that will leave it without anyone else to blame when crisis arrives. In this prophetic register, choosing life means choosing the struggle that follows awakening: not passive endurance, but participation in the promised illumination of the world.