Cage of freedom

None is more hopelessly enslaved than he who falsely believes he is free. – Goethe

If you insist on freedom, you can become a prisoner to it as incorruptible principle. This is also the character of fanaticism; you are a prisoner to those principles you will not compromise. Calling them “red lines” is quite revealing. 

Is this the character of human existence? A religious man submits to God. A spiritual woman submits to Love. A corporate creature submits to The Company. A political beast submits to The Party. A rugged individualist submits to The Wild. 

The ego casts submission as slavery. It tempts us away from the slavery it fears to ‘freedom’ from interference, ‘freedom’ from constraint. But this also becomes that to which you then submit, and you begin your journey as a prisoner of that particular story. 

One way or another, we will face the endless tensions that must arise between the group/environment and the individual. In response to this, Jung wrote, “Free will is doing gladly that which one must do.”

What is love (“gladly”), and what is free will?

I can’t define pornography, but “I know it when I see it” (Potter Stewart). I believe the same is true of free will, love, wisdom, health, grace… The academic process teases out clear distinctions in an attempt to produce watertight definitions of some phenomenon. This also applies to the legal world, and to science of course, but much escapes such definition, pornography being but one infamous example from a very large set. 

Furthermore, there is no escaping the fact that any definition, no matter how rigorously established, buckles when it meets the mess of Reality Out There. Even the constant of light’s speed gets tweaked. But more important than tiny wiggle-room uncertainties is how such constants, consensus pronouncements and verifiable results are wielded and turned into policy, or into machinery, or how they influence parenting or educational systems. As soon as something seemingly neat and tidy leaves the desk, laboratory or think tank, the rubber meets the road of unintended consequences.

Yes, control is an integral part of life. So is grace. 

Walking is a matter of control, but in cooperative balance with gravity and other physical forces. Free will is like this, like a dance. It is not solipsistic, is not completely free, is impossible in an infinite void. It is only meaningful in some constraining context that has structure, which is thus useful. What is the meaning of ‘individual’ (will) if there is no group (structure)? It is precisely the constraints of the specific context (group, culture, setting, situation) that give the individual something to do, something to react to, a ‘backdrop’ against which to discern and experience self. Reliable, discernible contrast to self is required for free will to be able to make choices. Free will is thus ‘free’ only in the sense of being unpredictable at some very fine granularity, and is ‘will’ in the sense of experienced preference.

None is more hopelessly enslaved than he who misunderstands freedom. I think we Westerners misunderstand. And I believe we owe this subject matter, this humanist/ontological topography ruthless reexamination. For that, we need freedom to discuss (o sweet irony!). For discussion to be richly valuable, we need to be mature – another undefinable – about listening to each other and taking the uniqueness of each perspective into account. 

Love is the fruit of the maturity we must earn before we can respond with grace to that which constrains us into ever-evolving being. And it holds free will sacred.

No one knows. Know this, and dissolve your inner fanatic

Look around you. What do you see? Is your world good? Is it evil? Ask yourself, who is guilty? Who is innocent? What are you? Now look at your neighbour. Look at your neighbour! Be brave enough to see yourself; your own reflection cast back at you, each reflected in each. Look where you stand: in a shining city on a hill, in the land of the free and the brave, standing for Liberty and Justice. How true do those words ring for you? When did you bring Liberty? Where did you cause Justice? I stand at the gate of a nation, a nation where power is not invited. I stand at the gate and I look out upon you. And you look back to me. But all I can do is reflect what I see. If you have come to receive, you will go away poor. If you come here to understand, you will leave here lost. For those who have understood, for those who have received, it is time. Returning to your scripture will not save you. Bending to your knees will not please anyone. That time is passed. This time is now. You are the judged. You are the chosen. I am here to break the mirror so you will see on what side you stand. What you see will be your choosing. – Messiah, episode 6, Netflix [my emphasis].

Propaganda ends where dialogue begins. – Jacques Ellul

Introduction

Jesus failed to persuade most of us. What chance do we ordinary mortals have?

Is an incarnation as a human being on Earth a trial on a training ground where, necessarily, incarnated souls have relatively low wisdom? That is why we incarnate; to grow in wisdom. There is no point incarnating on Earth beyond a certain level of wisdom. Does it follow, then, that things will never improve on Earth if those that incarnate are necessarily low-wisdom souls? It’s a mechanical question.

If this metaphor for what earthly existence is fundamentally about is close to true, must Earth only and always be a place where beginner souls are suckered into hellish suffering, until they finally wise up under the pressure of such weary toil?

Or, assuming incarnation is a soul-level, pre-birth choice, is it fair to ask if earthly existence is a sacrifice taken on by the bravest souls? For example, incarnating as Ukrainian or Russian, as Israeli or Palestinian is not something that would attract most. Incarnating into environments of almost insurmountable challenges, which are likely to cause the most terrible human experiences possible, would be a choice to take on great sacrifice, to risk agonies of every kind, in the faint hope it does some good, or that some success is achieved that is positive for All That Is in some way. The potential for soul-growth , this argument suggests, is directly proportional to the degree of suffering risked.

How horrible this sounds! I am writing airily about the slaughter of men, women and children, about terrible wounds, dismemberment, destroyed lives, the bitterest and most belligerent intergroup hatreds. But this is the exact horror that drives me to try to understand.

Going a little deeper, we turn to contemplate free will as a foundational fact of reality. Because I have free will, I can choose to turn my back on God, on Jesus, or, more simply, on love. If every one of us can fail to persuade the other, just as Jesus failed to persuade most with the full wisdom of God at his disposal, what hope for us immature, unwise humans of lowly relative capacities in persuading others that love is the answer? 

The evidence around us suggests that it is very hard for humans to commit to love.

Am I on track with such speculation? Or is Materialism the sounder ontology? Are our efforts on Earth no less the result of mechanical processes than the hot air pumped out from the rear side of a refrigerator?

My own ontology is that everything is God, everything is Consciousness. From this I choose to respect the sanctity of free will and so find myself compelled to ask: Is persuasion the right attitude, the right approach, the right starting point for furthering Right Action and the earthly evolution of wisdom? Does persuasion risk a violation of another’s free will? Direct instruction would be worse of course: Can a man’s wisdom evolve at all while other people make all the difficult decisions for him? Isn’t persuasion also an interference, albeit subtler? What of the subtle influences of NLP, behavioural programming, propaganda, bureaucracy, legislation, mass media? How respectful of free will are these processes and entities? 

How respectful of and sensitive to free will is ideological extremism, fervent belief, the desire to help others?

Inversely, isn’t taking on the pains of the world – extreme empathy – an act of inverted hubris? It is a grand delusion to think we are somehow morally obligated to save the world, or to absorb its pain in noble co-suffering. Isn’t the most noble undertaking to strengthen (nourish?) your ability to identify and then nurture your humility? 

Perhaps this is what Jihad describes.

But how does all this square with protecting the weak? What happens if we don’t even bother? Perhaps these are misleading questions, just as the goal of persuading others is the wrong way to go about dialogue. 

“Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.” 

I believe a healthier societal vector would be one deeply rooted in robust humility, in the sincere conviction that no one knows, that healthy dialogue – conversation aimed at learning more – is crucial to healthy governance, and that true honour is rooted in the complex and challenging undertaking to become humble. In precisely this vein, respecting free will means not seeking to persuade. Power – in contradistinction to natural authority, which is humble – is the antithesis of such respect, respect being an organic quality that is created and sustained by humility.

This helps us understand why power corrupts. Because power can forestall correction, it can attenuate its dialogue with the rest of reality. True dialogue invites correction. The more power you have, the longer you can forestall unwanted correction: hubris. You end up believing your own propaganda, you end up entangled – invested – in your poor, dialogue-free, propaganda-driven, low-wisdom decisions until it all comes crashing down around your ears. The poor (weak) bear the brunt of this: those who became dependant on and thus addicted to your power. Rulers require ruled just as ruled require rulers.

So, what is the loving, wise response to suffering, victimhood, and power?

If I love x, must I accept all x entails?

If I love the cat, I must accept the agonies of the creatures that suffer on its claws. If I love humanity, I must accept the suffering it is doomed to create in the wake of its low wisdom. If I truly love humanity, in other words, I must honour its free will: its right to act in accordance with its wisdom. I am required to accept the truth of this as graciously as I can.

Is this a callous position, no matter how it is intended?

Love entails acceptance. What we are challenged to accept upon a commitment to love and humility can be truly horrific at times. Obviously, it can be very hard to handle this truth, to pay the price such a commitment exacts.

One way or the other, decisions are investments in the future, and each decision is made with a specific quality of wisdom. Wisdom is something we enrich or degrade by our decisions. Feedback from the quality of our decisions can educate us on the current quality of our wisdom. With dedication and humility, feedback advances our wisdom. So goes the argument I’m borrowing for this article.

To interrupt that decision<->wisdom spiral – which I see as synonymous with evolution –, to puppet or nudge, in other words, a fellow human using your ‘superior’, ‘elite-level’ wisdom, is an interference that dishonours love and risks downstream unravelling of the best-laid plans of mice and men, an unravelling that can, at epochal junctures, become catastrophic. Indeed, the very idea of measuring one person’s wisdom against another’s is a low-wisdom folly, a contradiction, an exercise in futility.

This is my sense of it, a growing awareness that increasingly informs my reactions to my world and my sense of what could be constructive ways of responding to the great suffering and horror that comes to my attention. I experience this continuous process of reassessment as an evolving attempt to understand the pragmatics of love.

I am not against justice, nor am I against atonement. Wrongs happen and must be wisely remedied to the best of our wisdom; societal health depends on it. But enmities embed and compound. Divisions emerge and deepen and are far harder to handle than wrongs committed. Perhaps the most famous division today is that between ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’. 

As lovers of humanity, is this division, like all divisions, something we are required to accept? Yes, which means “do not hate it”. If our wisdom sees it as a cause of unnecessary suffering, our healthiest response must be to learn deeply why it exists and whether it is avoidable, or how best to handle it. My guess is that such a response is broadly appropriate with all such divisions.

The ‘elites’ are products of their world, just as ‘non-elites’ are products of theirs. Each one of us is an organic expression of our world, where “our world” includes our biology, history, culture, environment, psychology, memories, soul, etc. Indeed, the vague dichotomy I’m using – ‘elite’ versus ‘non-elite’ – is a lazy platitude from my world I use rhetorically, even though it misleads. In other words, what and how I communicate is necessarily determined by my world.

Why is this banal observation important?

Because changing one side of the ‘elite’-‘non-elite’ divide, as perhaps with all others of its like – Russian-Ukrainian, Israeli-Palestinian, etc. – , requires changing the other side. For the ‘elite’ to not be elite-like and to not do elite-like things requires that the ‘non-elite’ no longer be non-elite and no longer do non-elite things. Each is one half of a unified whole; each co-creates the other. This is an unwanted but necessary correlate of enmity itself; enmity requires enemy. Money requires scarcity. These truths are systemic and thus organic.

Necessarily organic expressions of our worlds, lasting change of expression requires lasting change of world. As you zoom in on this truth, it becomes impossible to separate “expression” from “world”. All that “world” is, ultimately, is a dynamic network or web of evolving “expressions”. There isn’t really anything else. This is a different formulation of the truth “There is nothing but God”.

Similarly, then, it becomes impossible to distinguish between ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’. I’m going to try to tease this into clearer relief via an example: Mike Benz expounding the corruption of democracy in the US, and thus in the West:

What I’m essentially describing is military rule. What’s happened with the rise of the censorship industry is a total inversion of the idea of democracy itself. Democracy draws its legitimacy from the idea that it is rule by consent of the people being ruled. It’s not really being ruled by an overlord because the government is just our will expressed by our consent with the people we vote for. 

The whole push after the 2016 election, and after Brexit, and after other social-media-run elections that went the wrong way from what the State Department wanted – like the 2016 Philippines election – was to completely invert everything we described as being the underpinnings of a democratic society, in order to deal with the threat of free speech on the internet. And what they essentially said is: “We need to redefine democracy from being about the will of the voters to being about the sanctity of the democratic institutions.” And who are the democratic institutions? “Oh, it’s us.” It’s the military, it’s NATO, it’s the IMF and the World Bank, it’s the mainstream media, it is the [largely State-Department- or IC-funded] NGOs. It’s essentially all of the elite establishments that were under threat from the rise of domestic populism, [establishments] that declared their own consensus to be the new definition of democracy. If you define democracy as being the strength of democratic institutions rather than a focus on the will of the voters, then what you’re left with is essentially: Democracy is just the consensus-building architecture within the democratic institutions themselves. And from their perspective, that [consensus building] takes a lot of work!

The amount of work these people do… For example, we mentioned the Atlantic Council, which is one of these big coordinating mechanisms of the oil and gas industry in a region, for the finance of the JP Morgans and the Black Rocks in a region, for the NGOs in a region, for the media in a region. All of these need to reach a consensus. And that process takes a lot of time, a lot of work, a lot of negotiation. From their perspective, that’s democracy! Democracy is getting the NGOs to agree with Black Rock to agree with the Wall Street Journal to agree with the community and activist groups who are onboarded with respect to a particular initiative. That is the difficult vote-building process from their perspective. If, at the end of the day, a bunch of populist groups decide that they like a truck driver who’s popular on TikTok more than the carefully constructed consensus of the NATO military brass, well then from their perspective that is now an attack on democracy.

I sympathise with their perspective and appreciate the various processes by which it emerged into being.

Specialisation is now so advanced – the human mind is endlessly restless and inventive, subdivides its prior subdivisions into ever more complicated subdivisions – only highly trained specialists have a remote chance of knowing what they’re doing in their particular niche. One’s specific combination of specialisations flows organically from one’s past decisions, each made with whatever quality of wisdom was available. Over time, we become more and more invested in – rooted to – our specialisations, our situation, and so become dependent on those who have specialisations we do not, just as they may become dependant on ours. Trust in each other gets harder as effective communication about what is going on is undermined by the generalised lack of mutual expert knowledge.

Societies are held together by trust. Trust is hard in highly specialised societies. This is a problem.

As if to replace the trust that once held hunter-gatherer bands and early tribal societies together, money emerged. Money – in the form of market-based price discovery – could be said to automate trust. As such, it holds societies together. But money also corrupts; it is power accumulated. You can accumulate money indefinitely and grow mighty defensive about your hoard. I’d even argue that money corrupts itself: Where does money end and banking begin? Where does banking end and bankers begin? Bankers corrupt banking corrupts money system corrupts everything else. To repeat, money is one of power’s most effective levers.

The fish rots from the head down, they say. But this hardly matters; it is one organism that is as organically rooted in its environment as any other. Shifting to the particular, when we ponder the mutual antipathies between, say, the proletariat and political class, is it really fruitful to hold one side more guilty than the other? Is not each group as enmeshed in The System as the other? Everyone has a responsibility to wisely handle what he/she is, but blaming others, virtue signalling and playing victim are low-wisdom games.

So should we stop specialisation? I don’t think so. That would be like stopping curiosity and inventiveness. If you love the cat, you must accept the agonies of those that suffer on its claws. Excising from humanity that which created specialisation would be to kill humanity, to hate it.

Anecdotally, I’m involved in building grassroots movements and activist companies, an endeavour that entails liaising between a (low) number of likeminded people with a (nonetheless) wide divergence of perspectives. Reaching creative and positive compromise on delicate matters all parties are happy with is a lengthy and energy-intensive process.

When you invest time building such enterprises, you do so because you believe fervently in them, or in something like status, or power, or wealth. They are, then, invariably labours of love of something. When ‘outsiders’ to the process – ‘non-elites’ – threaten one’s fragile progress, say likeminded activists groups who are attracted to the cut of your jib, that influx of new perspectives – aka the addition of larger democratic processes – threatens to break your rhythm and undo all your fine work. What do they know about what we – the ‘elites’ – have achieved! What right to they have to our precious hoard/work/status!

So if we can’t avoid specialisation, might we avoid us-and-them tensions, and thus avoid enmity? Well … yeees … but by learning humility … which is patience … which is wisdom … which is how we learn that avoidance, like oppression and suppression, is futile. The ‘solution’ is patient acceptance that seeks to learn wiser ways through unavoidable tensions and enmity. 

There is a deep but banal pragmatics to all this that is as obvious as it is irritating – and now existentially threatening – to a system that simply has no time for it. The Western world is systemically incapable of wanting to embrace the profound value of humility. And yet it is blindingly obvious that what bedevils the ‘elites’ bedevils ‘non-elites’ just the same, at least in essence. The ‘cause’ is how a mix of structural factors in tandem with our value system together determine our cultural relationship with fundamental phenomena like wisdom, love and humility.

If your inner fanatic requires, or even creates one or more bitter enemies by virtue of its nature, these observations might not be what you want to hear. You might be addicted to (invested in) your enmity, your enemies.

Revolution, oppression, resistance, blame, narrative control, democracy, tyranny, are all concepts that belong to all flavours of ‘elite’-versus-‘non-elite’ (us-and-them) divisions, or patternings. These patternings structure us all. If we don’t like the outcome of a particular patterning, we have to change it. This requires profound self-change, in some kind of harmony with each other, with the structuring guidance of some kind of loose-consensus vision regarding why we should take on such an insanely difficult challenge in the first place.

But, sadly, “Netflix and Pizza” is the easier path. Temptation is everywhere. Spies are out to get you. ‘They’ have all the power. It’s all part of The Plan. The MSM is not your friend. Lost in fogs of confusion, tired, cynical, afraid, we will exhaust every easy-looking escape until none are left.

Enmity is the enemy

Love knows no enemy, though hate hates it and fear fears it.

I opened above with “Jesus failed to persuade most of us.” But, in truth, he did not try to persuade at all. He spoke in parables, debated matters of theology and philosophy with the Pharisees, performed miracles and later made the ultimate sacrifice. Through it all, he was clear the choice of interpretation lay entirely with us. What we believe is up to us. (“What you see will be your choosing.”) 

I suspect this explicit element of his life, this lived expression of the sanctity of free will, was an epochal departure from what we might term the Old-Testament Way that included vengeance, retribution, a chosen people, and other such elements not wholly appropriate to Jesus’ message, his raison d’être.

In that vein, the chance we have with ourselves and each other is directly proportional to the quality of our humility, of our wisdom. Our human potential to do better, to evolve meaningfully, is directly proportional to how authentically we are not motivated by a desire to persuade. We must be motivated by a truly humble desire to learn. This challenge is precisely the challenge of becoming a truly loving human being.

We need each other’s help in this. This maturation of our humility, of our wisdom, simply cannot happen in splendid isolation. Diversity, then, is as much the cure for, as it is the cause of, what ails us. This is a fundamental paradox of existence. Utopia is dystopia. Escape into idealism can never work as hoped. The world will not listen to us – cannot listen – while we are wild-eyed fanatics speaking hot riddles no one wants to understand. Power monologue is not humble dialogue.

Until we learn how to stop terrifying each other, we will continue to watch on helplessly as we destroy our world, mutually shocked by how ugly and terrifying our enemy has inexplicably become.

The nature of the task

 We are humanity, a species divided by those who would subjugate us into atomised consumers hungry for whatever they are selling, atomise us into semi-living machine parts in their all-encompassing system, engineer us into 24/7 on-call guinea pigs for their endless experiments, into creatures free enough to obey their orders precisely. We are to become farm produce, fodder for our rulers’ revulsion and pleasure – as their momentary whims dictate.

That portion of humanity choosing love, truth and free will in defiance of their wannabe overlords are a loose group faced with the seemingly impossible task of becoming an army of love, truth and free will. They are separated from each other by any number of boundaries. They attempt the unprecedented, informed daily that they are domestic terrorists, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, selfish idiots, right-wing extremists.

That portion of humanity believing such information sees no value in what the army of love are selling. Those that army would liberate into the terrible beauty of their free will do not yearn for victory. Safety is their dream. Defiance is risky, selfish. The anti-socials should listen to the experts, think about other people, follow the science, trust what governments the world over are saying.

The defiant are thus pitched against the very people for whom they fight. Those for whom they fight reject what they are. And yet that army believes the compliant are deceived. But what right do they have to act on that belief? 

This is the nature of the task.

We, all of humanity, built history into today. Today is farce run riot. Today is Clown World, fear frenzy, righteous anger held at fever pitch by rulers hell bent on final dominion, hell bent on perfection, on faultless systems they expertly control. Soon, they sing, soon tragedy and suffering will be phenomena dimly understood from the pages of dull history books. Soon we will be happier than ever. Who can resist such an emancipating programme?

I understand this programme as a satanic process: the ego’s urgent ascent, a usurpation of God by Ego forever foretold by the way things are. It happens always in fitfully expanding spirals. Today it is happening globally, intensely, completely. 

Are we becoming one healthy diversity through this fiery crucible?

Yes, “army” is the wrong word. So are “struggle”, “defiance”, “resistance”, etc. But they are perfect, too. They bring us face to face with each other in exactly the right context to learn that the context itself is the problem. My sense is that we are individually processing – or being processed through – a series of experiences tailor-made – by Self and Other in fractious collaboration – to unearth old wisdoms as new. This process is a struggle because we resist each other. Because we resist, because we form sides to defend and fight for what we love, we co-create the struggle, the difficult lesson that it is precisely this oppositional tension we are here to transcend. It is an intense immersion-therapy session at global-collective scale, experienced uniquely by each of us, one by one. These things takes time.

This is the nature of the task before us. We are the nature of the task before us. I, you, everyone, all of us constitute Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, right-wing extremists … we constitute everyone and everything. We built history into today. Today is our inheritance, now and always. We struggle to feel, to own, our co-responsibility, our power, our beauty. We struggle to learn how to stop struggling, to abandon habits of ideology and belief that blind us to The Now. In clinging to the familiar in blank defiance of history’s corrective lesson, we are taught, painfully, that clinging is the problem. The fuel powering our desperate struggle is fear. When we see that, and learn to let go into what needs to be, everything will change. 

When we love, everything changes. This is the nature of the task before us. It is as simple, intricate and intimate as that.

Freedom! and the Frantic Drab

To act or not to act is a bewildering boundary. To navigate it competently, inquiry into the nature of free will, that hoary topic, is mandatory. It is tiring to put the question, more so to dwell on it; to this day it remains stubbornly unresolved, a futilely visited Gordian’s Knot, our blindest spot. How often, if at all, we are capable of free choice – choice we consciously experience as deliberate – may be beyond our powers of perception and deduction.  What follows is a cursory and playful toying with this topic.

First, we make note of the obvious reality of awareness. But we should then immediately acknowledge that our day-to-day awareness is limited, even where our own selves are concerned. Thus, even if we are disposed to insist that we own our bodies (whatever that assertion means), it does not take much effort of thought to realise that this supposed ownership bestows neither full awareness nor full control of what our bodies actually do (behind our backs).

Second, let’s accept that the dualistic mind-body split (an idea that permits a conceptual ‘ownership’ of the body by something not-body which is then the true ‘I’ by implication) is intellectual casuistry that does not accurately reflect reality, even if it reflects our (language-generated) perception of reality.

It follows that when, on those rare occasions, we are aware of having made a deliberate choice, we can neither know nor prove beyond doubt that it was wholly deliberate, fully the outcome of ‘self-control’, and not, say, the surface sensation of some inner process beyond conscious awareness.

Proof of free will must, therefore, lie beyond the reach of our perception and science.

Given these two conditions, faith is surely inescapable. In fact, faith lurks in the shadows of all our systems of thought and science like the mad lady of gothic literature, banished to the attic yet secretly in control of events. And this control is not the consequence of free will. How ironic is that, ladies and gentlemen?

My particular faith says that we indeed make deliberate choices, that we do exercise free will, but that this happens rarely. Its rarity is a direct consequence of what I have come to call the Frantic Drab. We have no time to spend Quality Time with ourselves, are thus strangers to ourselves, are also in automatic lockstep with a culture of endless baubles, and lack the personal psychological and emotional development to properly reflect on our actions and make wise or mature choices.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

Hopelessness: the Engine of Hope

Our lives are not our own.
From the film Cloud Atlas

 [W]hen the early Spanish explorers first saw what non-Native Americans now call the Grand Canyon, there was nothing in their conceptual repertoire – in their language – to enable them to perceive its dimensions accurately. For example, they thought the Colorado River, at the bottom of the canyon, was only a few hundred feet away. As a result, foot soldiers in full armor were ordered to reconnoiter the area – to run down and have a look around – and to the surprise of their countrymen, they never returned. This example illustrates how conception (what we think) precedes perception (what we experience through our senses) and how our expectations, beliefs, and values – all of which are carried by language – determine the way we experience our world.
Critical Theory Today, Lois Tyson (2006:257)

So, friends, we are about to enter 2013. Predictions are a dime a dozen, but there seems to be a fairly robust consensus emerging that the coming year will be very turbulent indeed. 

I don’t like predictions, nor do I seek them out; there is an inevitability to history, a vastness, that renders all prediction casuistry and chicanery in my opinion. And yet we would not be human if we did not try to impose sense on past, present and future events. Perception is interpretation, and interpretation is rooted in conceptual frameworks. Broad consensus is a vital battle ground, particularly in hierarchical, state-based social systems in which an ‘elite’ seeks to control as much as possible. Prediction is thus in part ongoing propaganda for controlling and shepherding ever-emerging consensus, to define ‘reality’ as it unfolds before our eyes. Currently, many pundits not normally given to ‘doom and gloom’ are predicting just that: doom. It is as if we are being spoon fed hopelessness under a glittering veneer of ‘business as usual’. Or it is as if we are selling despair to ourselves due to some collective cognitive dissonance we can’t (won’t) quite perceive. 

This is all standard fare, but deeper change is afoot than simple economic turbulence leading painfully but inexorably back to ‘normal’ – growth, Growth, GROWTH! of the economic realm. I believe we are transitioning from primarily ego-based interpretations of ‘reality’ – in which fear, control, ‘selfishness’ and ‘competition’ rule – to a paradigm in which we are far more consciously aware of the ego’s role in our perceptions and can therefore operate/react with greater consciousness and wisdom. A paradigm is emerging in which the sense that “our lives are not our own” is not reflexively dismissed as ‘socialism’, and money (whatever that is) is not a commodity to be hoarded, but a non-valuable record of economic transactions fostering cooperation and inventiveness in the interest of a growing commons which serves each ‘individual’. We are leaving behind one sense of what freedom is all about, and developing a different, perhaps more mature definition of freedom. Also up for redefinition are wealth, value and success; dessert, reward and punishment; obligation and responsibility; health and much else besides. We are not going through a simple economic downturn, but this has been true since 2007, and actually far earlier. 

There is no hope for the old system. Hopelessness is thus justified. I suspect many of us feel it. For many across the world, conditions are so terrible only suicide offers any hope of release from the pain. Indeed, hopelessness is pervasive enough, the absence of a clear, alternative vision palpable enough, to make it sometimes seem like the only possible way is down, forever. For that which is dying, the only way is down, but it is precisely this death which feeds the birth of the new. As Charles Eisenstein argues in his latest article, we are in the space between stories. On one hand we see decadence, decay, oppression, fascism, open corruption and criminality unimaginable even months ago. On the other we dimly perceive something vague. The former thus seems far more real, far more worthy of our attention. If we gaze at it for too long, we panic, do whatever we can to prevent its collapse. This is hopelessness, this is desperation. The new, the unknowable alternative, is so vague, so silly, so untried and untested, so impossible, it cannot inspire us. Hopelessness wins.

Ralph Boes* was interviewed in Basel on the 23^rd December this year (a few days ago). He describes a hopeless situation in Germany due to Hartz IV. He says many pregnant mothers on Hartz IV have committed suicide in despair. The pressure from the state system is so inhuman, so counter to the realities of people’s lives and the job market, that death offers the only release. And yet, just as we recently passed the winter solstice, just as we know 2013 is upon us, just as we know 2012 cannot be revived, we know spring must come. Of course, tired clichés aside, there is the matter of the timescale, there are the significant matters of war, environmental stress, fascism, dystopia. I agree that these are precarious times; I am not here selling some assured transition to flower-filled meadows alive with love and life. Boes uses the analogy of marching across a frozen sea. The weather warms, the ice breaks. For a while, marching forwards still makes sense, and swimming remains unimaginable, foolish. But at some point, after enough ice has melted, swimming becomes the only option. We are just about at that moment, and as we abandon what was once solid, what once stretched out all around us as far as the eye could see, we are called upon to be inventive and creative, and to begin imagining the new as we build it. Not just fringe loons like myself, but everybody, all talents, all perspectives. In this sense, we are becoming the 100%. 

Just as the Spaniards did not have the conceptual experience required to gauge the scale of the Grand Canyon, so we cannot appreciate the task in front of us. We are our habits, our patterns of thought, our beliefs. In this sense, the old travels with us into the new and does not die, but is transformed. Indeed, old and new are little more than opinions, perspectives. There are no endings, no beginnings, only ongoing emergence, and our lives are not our own. Hopelessness gives rise to hope as surely as Yin and Yang birth their opposites at each of their extremes. But hopelessness and hope are, at one level, ego-effects (as are all ‘opposites’), and dwelling on them, as on predictions, misses the point. How many of us make it through the turbulence is anyone’s guess, but that’s not the issue either, and applies equally to good and bad times. It’s not about individuals in the ego-sense, in the ego-perspective, and never really has been. We are wholly caught up in, and are generated by the infinite interconnectedness of everything, tasked with somehow making the ‘best’ of our lot, our ‘fate’, our biology, our history, come what may. 

There is free will, but it is not the ego’s plaything as ego would have us believe. Perhaps Jung had it right after all; “Free will is doing gladly that which we must do”, but I think there is more to it than that. As we are forced to let go of what we once held precious, as we jump unwillingly into what appears to be an inhospitable sea of endless uncertainty, the deeper meaning of free will becomes apparent; it is rooted in (and perhaps generates) circumstance, reflex, reaction, experience, bondage, limitation. And yet there in the ego’s blind spot, something gives birth to creativity and new forms, and we can be privileged to be part of that as one gift of interconnectedness. I like to think of this mystery as free will, but it is not ‘ours’ to wield. I see our egos as being on the receiving end of free will, not in any way as masters of it. From the ego’s point of view, ‘true’ free will is thus a paradoxical and magical thing, but a magic which destroys as it creates – forests, people, cities, civilisations … everything, causing both suffering and bliss, tragedy and good fortune, suicide and survival, hope and hopelessness, blandness and vibrancy: binary opposites as ego-effects.

To the extent that binary opposites exist at all, it can be helpful to see them as creators of both unity (“We”) and diversity (“I”). Our perceptions/experiences thereof, rooted in and shaped by slowly changing conceptual frameworks, are as much a part of their composition as is their endless, autopoietic spiralling. As the African word “Ubuntu” has it, I am because we are. I believe this wisdom is going to be increasingly helpful to us as we navigate the uncertainty ahead, as we deal with the exhausting see-saw of hopelessness and hope, as we build the ‘new’ from the collapse of the ‘old’.

The title of this article is thus deceptive, the content’s message purposefully muddled in a contortion of contradictions. Regardless of current or impending horror, regardless of imminent bliss or utopia, our lives are not our own. And yet we are indeed confronted by a daunting transition to something potentially ‘better’, we are indeed called to act, to be agents for positive change and to be creative through a transition that is, because of its enormity, very painfully disruptive. We must act despite the fact that this transition is far mightier than any of us as ‘individuals’, even though our actions can seem futile, a drop in the ocean. 

In this convoluted, long-winding way, I wish you what is most appropriate and beneficial both to you and us for the times ahead, and a creative relationship with your ever-changing circumstances.

Brace yourselves, it's going to be a bumpy ride. 

*Ralph Boes' 90% sanctioning was revoked towards the end of November. According to the employment agency, there had been an unspecified legal complication/error. Boes is eating normally again. We can reasonably read into this that the state does not want a public martyr in the Hartz IV colosseum and knows it is on shaky legal ground when it comes to Hartz IV.

Freedom and Free Will

I don’t believe in free will. We are not, in my opinion, free agents enacting Power of Choice decisions as sovereigns in a world of discreet and separate objects. That is an immature, solipsistic perception.

I believe in free will. Free will is the most beautiful thing. It emerges from bondage, necessarily. A fully isolated ‘person’ or ‘thing’ can do nothing; unsupported by the infinitely complex networks of environmental systems and subsystems, no system can be, or, as Charles Eisenstein puts it, inter-be. Nothing makes sense in isolation, and there is no such thing as nothing. No ‘thing’ can ‘be’ in isolation; existence is and can only be interbeing. And as you can see, we need new words to speak this new language, to tell the new story. Our language, which has us by the throat (pun intended), is too immaturely dualistic to sing the new tune emerging now all around us. The transition involves in part the acceptance and embracing of paradox. Opposites unite. Division is illusion. Illusion is reality. All interbeing.

Freedom stems etymologically from friendship. The taproot of freedom is therefore bondage, debt, obligation, embededness, necessity. Unless you are bound to the network which enables you, that is, unless you inter-are, you cannot inter-be, cannot exist or act, in which case freedom is utterly moot. ‘Free will’ is an expression for chance, or wriggle-room. The future is not predictable, not controllable, just like (what we call) the present (I do not know what time is, or ‘inter-is’). Unpredictability and uncontrollability are what free will is. It is not sovereignty. Free will is an emergent property operating at the level of a meta-self, a supra-agency no ego can perceive. It cannot be owned, it cannot be controlled, though the real illusion of control emerges from it. I could not be writing these comprehensible words were that not the case, though they emerge from me beyond my control. There is no sovereign Toby Russell autonomously doing this, despite what my ego-experience tells me. Toby Russell is the embedded vehicle enabling the emergence of that which emerges from him. 

Totalitarianism, or purity, which is about controlling all possible outcomes in the name of some ideology or other, impedes ‘freedom’ by fearfully refusing to allow ‘chaos’ and ‘anarchy’ to upset, spoil or otherwise make ‘messy’ some preferred vision of How Things Should Be. This possibility, this Dream of Human Ascent is as natural as rain, emerged by ‘chance’ out of chance, e.g., with ‘inventions’ such as the Taming of Fire (though other animal tool-use precedes this, is a ‘preparation’ of sorts, as is all prior evolution, in a way). Control is born by ‘accident’, totalitarianism its unforeseen descendant. All forms of the state tend towards totalitarianism because they are fundamentally about control, and as such must get ‘better’ at it to survive. This is a great paradox, since the anonymity of The Wild seems to beckon if we relinquish our grip, our control. Slippery, slippery slope!

We must feed the beast, for the beast is necessity. It is our relationship with it which determines how bound-free we are. There will always be debt. There is no freedom but that it arises from necessity and bondage as the wriggle-room in which creativity and change can occur. Carl Jung said, “Free will is doing gladly that which one must do.” Bondage is embeddedness in and emergence out of the environmental network of systems which enable us, which paradoxically yield freedom, or chance, which we might think of as the space for change, which yields suffering and joy, ‘opposites’ united by their interbeing.

I talk of chance as if it were fundamental, and yet deeper still there is design. The very fact we have the word and ‘understand’ it is evidence enough. Universe has birthed the concept, the perception. Therefore design is of Universe, of its fabric, is no new, accidental and separate epiphenomenon of ‘matter’. Intelligent design unknowing, blind. Blind, intelligent design, Dawkins’ worst nightmare; the intelligent, blind watchmaker interwoven into everything. There is nothing which is not god. There is only god. All horror and beauty ever perceived included, and everything else too. This is the bitter sweet pill. 

Woodie Guthrie sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” When you let go of the illusion of control, fall backwards into whatever embrace nature has in store for you, accepting, then you know ‘freedom’. It is the heady and liberating air of necessity. In a world of fear, control and ‘ownership’, freedom becomes the worst kind of rigid bondage. Today we have Consumerism, dying for any number of reasons. We are drenched through with its fear, and its fear of demise. Our systems of propaganda, which we each feed and sustain as we are fed and sustained by them, paint my definition of freedom as shoddy poverty, ‘raw’ nature as idle resources “red in tooth and claw.” My position here is (partly) from Rousseau of course, except that I can no longer be ‘against’ any of that which I disparage. Being against the state or the market or the corporation is like being against solar flares or hurricanes or the human orgasm. Does this mean I no longer have the will to battle for a better life (whatever that is)? Yes. And it means also I have more desire than ever. Good is bad, everything is natural, and I can’t not fight for the love of life I feel. Love is the liberating bond freeing me to inter-be.

Charles Eisenstein:

“I want you to listen to this paradox, really not with your mind or your reason that tries to figure it out, but I want to just kind of let it sit in the atmosphere, and for you to feel. So the paradox is this:

The more beautiful world our heart tells us is possible is inevitable. It is going to happen. 100% sure. And it will only happen through the exertion of our full efforts and the application of all of our gifts. If you don’t apply all of your gifts to this, then it’s not going to happen. Yet it is inevitable that it will happen.”

Julian Jaynes:

“The critical problem with most of these studies is that if the subject decided beforehand to look for such contingencies, he would of course be conscious of what he was learning to do. One way to get around this is to use a behavioral response which is imperceptible to the subject. And this has been done, using a very small muscle in the thumb whose movements are imperceptible to us and can only be detected by an electrical recording apparatus. The subjects were told that the experiments were concerned with the effect of intermittent unpleasant noise combined with music upon muscle tension. Four electrodes were placed on their bodies, the only real one being the one over the small thumb muscle, the other three being dummy electrodes. The apparatus was so arranged that whenever the imperceptible thumb-muscle twitch was electrically detected, the unpleasant noise was stopped for 15 seconds if it was already sounding, or delayed for 15 seconds if it was not turned on at the time of the twitch. In all subjects, the imperceptible thumb twitch that turned off the distressing noise increased in rate without the subjects’ being the slightest bit conscious that they were learning to turn off the unpleasant noise.”