More angst, less answers, some ataraxis

dr. elsewhere here

Hearkening back to an earlier post, in which dr. elsewhere airs her angst, I’d like to revisit a couple of the questions raised in that discussion.

Though the unanimous response was hopeful and heartening (and so kind and compassionate, really a statement of the human spirit), there is likely no argument that we remain in a state of great flux teetering on the brink of chaos. We can certainly agree that things will continue to get worse before they get better, and that they could conceivably get much much worse.

Just to establish the common ground here, we can also certainly agree that the power structure that is this neocon misled administration is falling apart at the seams, with many of those self-serving Republicans who have heretofore been too blind or dumb or lazy or cowed to speak out are now doing just that, albeit most often with notable timidity and considerable qualifiers (still self-serving, of course). I would also posit that many of those who were once in the thick of all things neocon-powerful are now smelling the coffee and readying themselves to start straddling fences so as to assure self-preservation when the dust settles (include most Dems here; we have little reason to be proud of the deaf, dumb, and blind cowardice of our politicians in general). Some are even beginning to show signs of intending to clear those fences altogether, at least on certain issues (not least of which being the Dubai ports debacle), typically for the same purpose of saving one’s hide.

To highlight that scenario, I would also like to remind folks that there is no honor among thieves, and once the many balls of investigative exposures get rolling, we will see yet more self-serving behaviors in the forms of numerous coats turning on each other. It could get very interesting, in a rather perverse, voyeuristic fashion – to witness the ensuing feeding frenzy. Because that frenzy will come, sooner or later. It always does; this is the way of such things; in the scramble for power, all those happily feeding upon the weak will begin feeding upon each other when their own cushy positions are suddenly at risk. Given the scope and the stakes, things could get even more chaotic and gruesome than history has recorded heretofore.

These mindless, bloodthirsty, power-mongering nincompoops will not go down without a fight. Or an outright refusal that manifests in the form of a full-blown overt coup (as opposed to the slower subversive one now in play). Most of us anticipate and dread such events, replete with martial law, detention compounds, and suspension of everything that resembles American life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

So here we are again, at that question mark: What are we to do?

Three years ago, right after the 2002 “elections,” when I realized that another one had been stolen with astonishingly brazen cynicism, the unthinkable occurred to me: I don’t think we’re in a democracy anymore, Toto. Given the failure of the press to present the truth about 9/11, about our hapless president, about the corporatization of the country and the world, about the illegality of pre-emption, about the war drums being beaten about Iraq, about the complicity of the media in all these things (and all the torture and corruption and failures since then), we clearly no longer had a free press. And of course, we didn’t have real elections anymore. The USAPATRIOT Act had stripped us of many of our most crucial rights. All that was left was the coronation of the clown and the installation of all those new rules and exemptions to the old ones, à la Animal Farm, which are now coming at quite the clip.

But at that point, over three years ago, I realized I had only a passing notion of what it might mean to think outside a democracy. So I decided to read the writings of some folks who knew something about that kind of life. The two authors who impressed me the most were Gandhi and Vaçlav Hävel. At the risk of over-distilling the genius their lives each embody, I’ll offer what I took away from them for my own purposes of trying to navigate in this newfound democracy-not.

One of Gandhi’s greatest quotes is actually a variation on the theme of our Declaration of Independence, that the power of governments derives from the consent of the governed. He, in a tone so typical to Eastern thought, presented it merely as an observation, whereas our document of liberty assumed this point as a premise, and therefore a demand: Government requires the cooperation of the governed. The American Revolutionaries took this as a fundamental right upon which to build a new kind of government, but they first used it as a strategy to subvert the iron hand of the Crown. Gandhi placed this premise alongside the non-violent (ahimsa) cornerstone of his resistance philosophy; just stop cooperating. The Crown gained immense revenues and taxes from salt, so Indian natives were forbidden to gather it, a ritual they had practiced for millennia. Gandhi recognized the absurdity of so ancient a practice being forbidden, let alone taxed, so he led a massive salt-gathering event as the maiden test of the power of refusing to cooperate. (Compare this incident to the Boston Tea Party.) Ultimately Gandhi won out because England was being internationally shamed into facing the hypocrisy of claiming the white man’s burden to protect and guide the lesser hordes while slaughtering them en masse. (Compare this shame to the current hypocrisy of invading Iraq with our brand of democracy that includes torture and suspension of habeas corpus.)

Hävel’s situation was slightly different in emergence and application, but the same in principle: Government can be rendered irrelevant without the participation of the governed. In Eastern bloc countries of the Soviet Republic, any and all dissent and resistance was routinely and brutally crushed. Western European and especially British niceties of legal rights such as fair hearings were thoroughly unfamiliar in this mindset that had only freed the serfs around the time slavery was abolished in the US. All the great and passionate leaders of resistance movements and rights activists were being summarily snuffed or gulaged by the central Soviet authorities, and the communities that harbored them were being brutally punished with increasing frequency.

Consequently, the dissidents were forced to shift focus from resistance to sheer survival. What Hävel described was, interestingly, a far truer adherence to the pure notions of the Communist collective than anything the Moscow government ever manifested, but such ironies and hypocrisies are the stuff of power politics. The people in these villages were forced to become real communities, microcosms of self-governance in survival mode. They saw to it that every single villager had access to food, water, shelter, clothing, education, and medical care, to their best abilities and resources (compare this to Hamas in the Palestine Occupied Territories). If they needed something big, like a turbine or antibiotics, they dealt only with the local Soviet representative, who after all had to live there among them. Everyone worked and contributed, and everyone shared whatever they had. The needy were tended to, and no one profited at anyone’s expense. Given that they were constantly fighting to survive, actually, no one profited at all. Unless one counts surviving against horrific odds a “profit” and not a loss. Yet another irony here is that such a “utopian” vision may only be fully realized under the most dire of circumstances.

Many reasons have been forwarded in explanation for the implosion of the USSR. Republicans love to think it was Reagan’s genius and strength of leadership that forced them into bankruptcy by ratcheting up the arms race and bullying them into tearing down that wall. Whatever (you’d think they might consider how this strategy applies to our own military now, but whatever). Others site rampant corruption, which no doubt contributed, given the abundant evidence for organized crime dominating their economy now. But Hävel suggested that the more likely reason the Soviet government collapsed was that these real collectives, surviving despite the government and without any real dependency on them, had rendered the government irrelevant. Government had ceased to exist because the governed did not even need it anymore.

There has likely never been in history a culture more dependent on its government than US citizens are right now. Every single thing we require, from food and water to heat and shelter, depends upon huge grids and structures over which we as citizens have no control, into which we have no real input. It’s all lobbyists and profiteers, and none of those folks ever bothers to stop and think about mere survival. They just want another, bigger yacht and a villa on the Riviera. And most of us mere citizens just want another, bigger SUV and a house in the Hamptons.

What is both scary and exciting – as in, hopeful – is that, regardless of what this godforsaken government does, regardless of how bad their crimes and tyranny and war-mongering get, we are all ultimately going to be faced with that “mere survival” situation, and quite possibly within our lifetime. We might fear the insanity and cruelty of oppressive powers, but that will not hold a candle to struggling against the wrath of Mother Earth when she has had enough of being so mindlessly abused.

Regardless of whether we are surviving tyranny or Nature’s revolt against us, though, the ultimate solution will be the same. We’ll be forced to shed the mortal coil of all this superfluous crap and remember what it’s like to simply survive. And we can only do that together, as communities, where no one loses out and no one takes the lion’s share. Recycling, though of course a good effort toward staving off the inevitable annihilation of the planet, is alas somehow a somewhat cosmetic solution. Do any of us really know what happens to all those plastic water bottles and to-go boxes after we place them on the curb? We have become so completely out of touch with, so abstracted from, the earth that sustains us – indeed, even alienated from the basic awareness that it is always and ultimately the earth that sustains us – that none of us could really easily make the transition from our lives of running water, flush toilets, delivered food and heat, and waste removal, let alone airports and cell phones and SUVs, to anything more primitive. Most of us have encountered this rough kind of life on camping trips or visits to third world countries, but these are really just survival voyeurism. We’re not even phoning it in because we’ve totally lost the number.

My point in all this, I suppose, is to suggest first of all that our only hope for surviving the multifarious insanities of our current world is likely to simply render the insane leaders irrelevant by tending to the needs of our local communities without dependencies upon the powers that be, as best we can. And be prepared for the worst, of course, by recognizing that the basics are really all that matters: food, water, clothing, shelter, medicine, education. Even safety and security tend to take care of themselves to a great extent when everyone is working together, when no one is exploiting his neighbors, and no one is going without.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the land.

A second corollary suggestion might be the simple caution to consider that the principles we are ultimately espousing may only be most fully realized at that edge of survival, or at least with a keen eye to that edge. Once survival and security are assured, then it’s just too tempting to take them for granted and to start harboring what you have, and from there, it’s a slippery slope to hoarding and hating any and all who might take it away.

Still, it is also true that, in those minimal circumstances, folks certainly tend to show their worst, sabotaging the entire community efforts in greedy desperation for survival of the fittest individual, damn the species. Life at the edge will bring out either the best or the worst in us all, make no mistake. So here we are yet again at yet another crucial juncture asking yet another fundamental question: How will each of us decide these priorities for ourselves? How will each of us determine our own principles that guide our actions, where will we draw the lines of compromise, when will we be able to sacrifice integrity, or instead, life itself?

The truth is, we are each faced with these same questions, though on a much smaller scale in terms of immediate consequences, every day. Will we purchase the big SUV for safety, or the hybrid to save the planet? Will we go to WalMart to save money, knowing full well this exploits foreign workers and denies our neighbors decent jobs? Will we speak up when our bosses are mismanaging or worse, or keep our mouths shut, even when someone else loses their job unjustly for the boss’s crimes, or worse, for speaking up when you didn’t?

How does one make those decisions? None of them is a matter of life or death. And yet many will equivocate over a few dollars or the need to keep a job so the mortgage and credit cards can be paid. All that money and all that stuff, so little content, and evidently no contentment.

If we consider that our smallest decisions are often made from vague, unspoken feelings of discontent, then perhaps it is worth considering the possibility that not only is this a bottomless pit, but that larger decisions of greater consequence made from such a place only translate as greed and can only bring destruction. Logically then, in order to find a way out of this bottomless pit, the best guiding principle might well be gratitude, which is the opposite of greed. It’s impossible to be generous when greed is driving the system; what passes as charity in the greedy is really only patronizing self-service. But it is impossible not to be charitable when gratitude prevails.

And if you would like something to feel grateful for in all this chaos, I submit it is the chaos itself. Chaos is our harbinger of doom, sure, but also of great changes. If we can all agree that the human experiment has gone seriously awry, then great change is absolutely necessary. We are all frustrated and angry and on edge and floundering in angst precisely because things are so wrong and in need of radical correction. And the transition occurring within the chaos is so terribly uncertain; anything can happen except the old pattern. So take heart; nature always survives, even if we don’t. The planet will correct for the insanity, even if we won’t. What I am suggesting here is that the key to survival lies far deeper than recycling and protesting and holding criminals to truth, and deeper even than refusing to cooperate, though all these actions arise naturally from a deeper motivation, a fundamental principle. That deeper motivation must always be kept in mind – indeed, it should be adopted as a state of mind rather than taken as a set of principles – and should be clearly grasped for that purpose in order for it to be the shaping force of every action. This state of mind is precisely the opposite of compassionate conservatism, which in itself is something of an oxymoron. Instead, this state of mind is a compassionate benevolence, borne of gratitude and directed toward all. Y’know, that love thang.

Odd, isn’t it, how the real bottom line distills into this pearl of love and gratitude that all the holy saints have known as compassion, benevolence. Not religion per se, not as it is generally practiced, that distorted dogma that abstracts a person’s own mind from awareness of our own feelings and intuitions, our own sense of what is right and wrong in each unique instance rather than relying on a set of absolutes that will inevitably face exceptions. No; ultimately we must each face each decision in each circumstance before us with the simplest but most fundamental principle that generalizes across all conceivable instances. And there can be no question that for any prayer of success – of mere survival – all our actions must be informed by such a motivation, such a state of mind. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Do no harm. If anyone harms (others), God will harm him, and if anyone shows hostility to others, God will show hostility to him. Make every decision with consideration of how it will affect those of the seventh generation. All variations on this same theme.

Please trust me; I never dreamed I’d end up here. All I had in mind when I started this piece was what I’d learned from Gandhi and Hävel. But that part raised as many questions as it answered, so I just kept going. And, well, there you are.

Or, actually, here we are….

…still screaming about injustice. But, hey….
Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice, for they shall have their fill.
Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.