My Inner Anarchist & Me:Reuntited and it feels so good

Again I’m struck by how this class has led me to ponder the facets of point of view, to consider differently and to see with new eyes. Ways of seeing are as variable as everything else, and those based on the goal of the getting of wisdom rather than on the accretion of power will be more true and authentic. The object seen through that lens will be presented with greater disinterest -- although there’s no such thing as pure objectivity since the simple act of naming it disqualifies it from itself--but at least it may be examined more fairly. The human agency that powers the arc of desire to know essential truths about things is fueled by a deep need to uncover their numinous hearts. It’s what the examined life demands and Socratic method supports. In that way, Pre-Columbian Histories of North America as facilitated by Sev, Barnard’s Keeper of the Shamanic Trace, with the help of fascinating, well-chosen readings, becomes not just a course but, a journey of the spirit to the things that matter most. Truly psychedelic, without even loading the effigy pipe.

I entered the class a liberal Democrat, which I remain for practical purposes for the time being, but came out transformed, and fully reunited with my inner anarchist. It was a part of myself long buried but never extinguished, hidden from sight by the accumulation of debris that the soul-killing hierarchy of capitalism produces in exchange for freedom. I served as a carrier of baskets of soil for far too many years, and have no intention of ever doing so again. The accumulation of material goods and economic clout should never be an end in itself, but now I’ve come to realize that one cannot dip into the system without being trapped by it.

It could be argued that the purpose of Darwin’s oeuvre was to provide natural scientific support to the ideas Rousseau presented in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality in 1754 and The Social Contract in 1762, and that The Origin of the Species was their natural and inevitable successor. One might also suggest that Darwin’s book moved to clarify and offer an alternate viewpoint to the overarching principal of the Industrial Age that humankind climbs inexorably up the rungs of civilization’s ladder from savagery to complex social organization, as codified later by Lewis Henry Morgan in Ancient Societies (1877), and that what is higher is always better. This concept stands in stark contrast to the emotional aesthetic, creativity, and communion with Nature and our better intuitive selves that defined the concomitant ideals of Romanticism.

It is this tension between the disciplines of science on one side and the realms of philosophy on the other that allows spandrels to hang in the space between them waiting for all the diversity of human creative thought from finest flowers to most poisonous fruits to flow into them and develop. Here, between what is and what might be, a brave new world that has such beauty in it shares a bed with visions of the End of Days, clutched in a headlock for the ultimate prize, the success or obliteration of the human race.

The great revolutionary year of 1848 straddled the waist of a century that simultaneously spanned both the Romantic Movement and the Industrial Age. The time was torn by the advances of science and industry crashing constantly into the spiritual longing to stay true to the morally right and good. At no other period, except, perhaps, our own, have the possibilities of what might be weighed as heavily on the imagination of the present that is. Nor have the potential outcomes of theses ideas mattered as much to humanity’s greater combined future as they do now.

We are at such a point in history now, ready to move away from the economic system that has ruled human lives in ways as bad as, and at times far worse, than the Colonialism it replaced, but whose patrimony it conserved intact. One simply replaces the star of nationalism at the top of the tree with that of lucre, and 90% of the resources still remain in 10% of the same hands. It becomes Chapter 11 & 13 recombinant voodoo economics repackaging the same old shit in a crisp new cover, as is happening now with AIG and Chrysler. Sometimes you simply have to pull the plug. But there can also be revolution from the bottom up, and not from the top down, as described by Christopher Boehm in Hierarchy in the Forest: the Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. It can be relatively bloodless, and is essentially a change from within. The problem with that type of overthrow of power is that you have to get all the other slaves to work as one against the overseers, and that never work.

The numbers of past civilizations that reached Icarian heights only to crash and burn leaving no suicide notes explaining their sudden and complete departures is astonishing. But, there is another alternative, the one Wilson recommends, and that is to simply walk away and start over, as it seems possible the people at the bottom rung of Chacoan and Cahokian civilization(s) may have done. We all have the choice to refuse to help construct the pyramids of others. If enough people at the base remove themselves, the center will not hold. The society will collapse leaving behind only the monuments of man’s inhumanity to man.

Sylvia V.T. Calabrese