The Beastly Word Magic of Law

The imperial court of law, the traditional seat of power where assembled the great offices of the empire, was one of the most majestic of architectural feats, built out of the finest limestone buffed and polished to a sheen. There were two sprawling wings with towers that thrust so high as to seem precarious, and looming above the broad stairway were vast balconies from which, in the distant past, legal proclamations had been made and great speeches given to gathered throngs.

The great temple, having been rebuilt and extended upon in numerous styles, stood some distance behind the court building. There once had been a large open space of lawn and gardens between the two institutions of authority, but now even the remnants of it were buried and overgrown. In approaching the main entrance of the court building, the temple was entirely obscured, as if it weren’t there at all. Standing before the court building, the awe of the edifice, covered in intricate stonework, crowded about with statues and gargoyles, entirely dwarfed the individual’s view. The impression it gave imperial subjects was that law and order had always been and always would be.

But not all was as it appeared. A secret underground tunnel connected the two buildings of the establishment, a passageway that had only ever been known and used by the highest powers of the land. It was a dimly-lit tunnel with water leaking between the settling and crumbling bricks overlaid upon rough-hewn stones, allowing a black mold to cover the walls that glistened in the flickering light. Among the keepers of archaic knowledge, it was believed that the tunnel was older than any other structure, the names of its early builders and their original purpose lost to memory.

It was so well hidden that, over time, fewer and fewer of the respective elites of court and temple realized it was there at all, each realm of power having become publicly treated as separate; if there lingered vague rumors of conspiracies that, of course, were never uttered out in the open among respectable company. Some of the ancient patriarchs, long ago having harnessed the magic of longevity, were the only ones remaining who held the knowledge of how to find and open the concealed doorways deep down in the underground labyrinth of corridors.

Though long-lived, one by one, almost all of the last old nobility died off. Those who survived were the most conniving and dangerous. Yet power had shifted across the centuries, and the old ones receded further into the shadows. The two buildings, facing in separate directions, had become almost entirely isolated in their spheres of activity. Gradually over the generations, the area between them had grown unruly with vegetation and was overtaken by a thick woods. Neither building could any longer be seen from the other, as if they existed in their separate worlds. Yet some of the ancient ones still traversed the passageway, holding their secret close because the fewer who knew about it the greater the power for those few.

What had changed within the imperial bureaucracy was an incoming coalition of young wealth and aspiring reformers, with little concern for entrenched customs. This new governing class knew nothing about the history of the institution they had inherited. Nor did they know the true identity of the old guard. The old ones, having in the past been accepted as aristocracy, increasingly came to hide behind other identities. Few realized how old they were, as living memory no longer reached beyond the buzz of events that occupied the public arena. It wasn’t only that these figures of the establishment were well up in age. The spells of long life had altered them. They were no longer human.

This was the darkest of secrets, around which the wildest of rumors couldn’t imagine. These powerholders hadn’t merely devolved to apes but further back to the reptilian ancestor of all mammals. It took all their guile, sorcery, and enchantment to disguise their true forms. This required so much of their strength and energy that they had little left over for other purposes. Even so, as long as they remained hidden at the heart of power, they could wield their dark magic. And the greatest spells they cast were the laws of the land, not mere codes and rules but words of power.

Without their legislative witchcraft, their masks of human appearance would dissolve and fall away. They didn’t impose laws to control the population but to control themselves, to maintain their false appearance. The most important of these laws, as symbolic incantations, involved animals for that is what they had become, subhuman. There were rules, restrictions, and regulations on which animals could be kept and how, the conditions of raising and slaughtering animals, in the preparation of food and what could or could not be eaten. But more than anything else, the linchpin of their magical order was the anti-bestiality laws, for the beastly lust of the old ones was barely suppressed. The greater control they had, the more they needed a system of control; for they had no control of themselves.

For this reason, though the true believers worshipped at the temple in the respectable formality of traditional rituals, the mainspring of theomorphic power had always been in the court, a place of concealed wizardry where the old gods, forgotten to all others, were still worshipped. The eroding command and authority among these licentious lawmakers was a threat to their very existence. If their dark nature was revealed, their whole charade would end and they would forever fade from the human world, never to again regain their position of dominance. They used every machination they had devised over the eons. But most of all, word magic, underlying the sway of legislative governance, was the ultimate source of their rule.

They did not so much oversee the governing bodies of the empire as they mastered the human mind. If thoughts and identity could be molded and shaped, then those under such influence could be pulled this way and that like puppets. The incantation of words, not only in law books but also in the voices of town criers and decrees etched on stone pillars, was what put the spell on the public mind. They couldn’t actually alter or even hide their scaly skins, their unblinking lizard eyes, the stench they exuded. But they could cause the people to not perceive them as they were, and to not see is to not know. The enforcement of laws in the world was less significant than the imposing of the laws on the human psyche. Appearance was everything. And so they invested nearly all their wealth in spectacles of power.

All of that was to obscure what happened behind closed doors, far uglier than any corrupt dealings and crony machinations. If it was ever discovered the wild abandon of beastly orgies they committed in the bowels of the court building, the last vestige of deception would be undone. What was seen could never be unseen, what became public knowledge could not be undone. Yet their facade of respectability had long ago begun to peel away, had already revealed glimpses of what lay underneath, but only the briefest of peeks and only for those who were looking. Even then, not many could quite believe it for the ruse of word magic was quickly again invoked in comforting stories, even if it left a spreading sense of unease — it could not be true, it was too horrifying to even allow into consciousness.

This put the lizard people in a state of precarity, for eventually the pretense of denying the undeniable would fracture and with it the foundation of their world. In their terror, they pushed ever harder the lever of legalistic power, constantly layering spell upon spell such that it barely held together. It was all they had left. Their sneers of narcissistic confidence belied a fight for survival and, in desperation, their actions became ever more extreme, their word magic ever more obscene. The suspicions that had already floated in whispers were then being spoken out loud, if at first only outside the halls of power. They still held key leadership positions, in having maintained their grip over the court, so as to invoke their public glamor. But for how long could that last?

Our Life Among the Reactionary Right

The Left and the Right in Relationship

We find that, in our location and life circumstances, we are in contact with a variety of people across the ideological spectrum(s), along with across cultural differences. This diverse town is a major medical and research center centered around a liberal state college. The writers workshop here is the oldest of its kind. Though relatively small, the community draws people from all over the country and all over the world; and it’s situated amidst farmland, pulling in many residents and workers who grew up in rural communities and small towns as well; thus balancing out the middle class WEIRDness (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic). But our own bias is mostly that of a local yokel, if someone who at times has lived in other states and regions of the country. Most of our life has been in this town and, though without a college degree ourselves, we fit in just fine with our intellectuality, love of learning, and book obsession. All of that, of course, goes along with our liberal-mindedness.

Yet, as radically left-liberal as we might be, we were raised by conservative parents who are rightward socially, religiously, and economically, if they are somewhat moderate; and we spent our teen years in the conservative, nay right-wing authoritarian, Deep South. Even now in being surrounded by liberalism, for various reasons, we somehow end up spending much of our time talking with those on the right, some more reactionary than others: Republican partisans, fundamentalists, Tea Partiers, MAGA supporters, and alt-righters. Some are family, while others are friends and coworkers. They are a diverse bunch and so they wouldn’t agree on a number of issues, but among them there is a common disconnect that comes up again and again. It’s certainly frustrating, to a leftist, and often just plain strange and disconcerting.

We probably spend more time thinking about such people than they spend thinking about us, and so here we are. Let’s give an example. There is one guy we’ve personally known for a long time. He is an all around conservative Republican trapped in a right-wing media bubble and echo chamber. His views tend toward the conventional, though increasingly reactionary as he ages. He more or less fits the stereotypical profile of demographics and life experience that one might expect, though not relevant for our present purposes. Among our right-wing relationships and acquaintances, he is the one we talk to the most regularly and the most engagingly, for the simple reason we’re around each other a lot. So we are particularly familiar with his worldview and what motivates it. We are informed of his background and what has shaped his life.

He is smart and educated, as is the norm around here, and yet his understanding is so narrowly confined as to give him no larger perspective. Admittedly, he has physically seen more of the world than we have. Intellectually, though, he is less well traveled. Anything that disagrees with his beliefs and biases is often dismissed out of hand. Though retired from the educational field, he simply doesn’t have much curiosity outside of what he already knows or thinks he knows, and having been an expert in his field he is prone to the smart idiot effect, in believing he doesn’t have to research a topic for himself to have a relevant opinion that is to be taken seriously. When point blank given evidence that contradicts his views, he’ll typically refuse to look at it and just digs in further; the standard backfire effect that research shows is more common on the Right, and well-educated conservatives most of all (an interesting phenomenon we won’t discuss further here).

All evidence that doesn’t confirm his bias is asserted as having a liberal bias or is somehow wrong, faulty, or whatever; without any need to prove it (e.g., climatology science is false, manipulated, and corrupt because he read one right-wing book on the topic and so no further information is needed). He won’t offer counter-evidence, just assumes he is right until he is proven wrong, which is impossible to do in his own mind since he already knows he is right. How does one respond to that? Of course, when this anti-intellectualism is pointed out, he gets defensive and asserts that, as someone on the left, we’re just calling names. No, we’re not. We’d love to have a meaningful intellectual discussion with him about many topics, but his intellectual willingness in many cases is not up to match, though not for lacking general intelligence, far from it.

A Liberal Mind Amidst Right-Wing Media

If this otherwise nice fellow were merely stupid, we wouldn’t bother talking to him in the first place or at least we wouldn’t engage with him beyond casual chatter. Yet in having been bottle-fed on early Cold War propaganda, he lacks intellectual defenses against manipulative media. He tends to mindlessly repeat the rhetorical framings, narratives, and talking points he hears from right-wing media and political elites. Unlike us, his media consumption doesn’t extend very far, pretty much limited to sources that conform to the same basic set of scripts. He doesn’t have exposure to any left-wing media or even moderately liberal media, in the way we are constantly exposed to right-wing and conservative media. Part of the reason for this difference is that we have an uncontrollably driven sense of curiosity that ends up leading us all over the place, along with what we inadvertently pick up from the surrounding cultural and media milieu.

As a liberal-minded liberal, it’s hard for us to imagine not wanting to know other perspectives. Besides, even when trying to mind our own business, it’s impossible to ignore right-wing media when it’s constantly in our space, such as televisions playing in the background and newspapers laying about. Keep in mind that all corporate media has a right-wing bias, if only in terms of the capitalist realism and class war of the ownership class (i.e., the super-rich elite who own most of the corporate media that is concentrated in a few transnational corporations). Also, consider that, if you go anywhere in the United States, the most common channel to be playing in any place of business (restaurant, bar, hotel lobby, etc) is Fox News. This isn’t a right-wing country, at least not in terms of supermajority public opinion, but we are ruled by a right-wing elite, media and otherwise.

That is the thing. In our having liberal-minded thin psychic boundaries, it’s not part of our capacity to block out what is in the world around us, whether or not it would be our preference. We are hyper-attuned and sensitive like a staticky shirt picking up lint everywhere we go, the kind of cognitive tendency that comes up in studies on what distinguishes liberals and the liberal-minded. It’s an expression of high openness to experience, and it has other affects as well, in terms of the dual trait openness/intellectuality. Though we may be an extreme example in our roving curiosity, surveys show that liberals in general consume more conservative media and alternative media than do conservatives of liberal media and alternative media; partly because liberals are on average younger and spend more time on the media-diverse internet. Then again, it’s hard for a liberal to do otherwise, of any age group, as right-wing media is pervasive, while leftist media is mostly excluded from the ‘mainstream’.

Anyway, it’s just in the nature of liberals to be liberal-minded, that is to say motivated by intellectual curiosity and cognitive complexity, and so seeking out a greater variety of views and sources. One of the strengths and weaknesses of the liberal-minded personality trait openness is that the boundaries of the mind are thin and porous, that is to say the opposite of highly focused and narrowly confined. To the degree one is liberal-minded one would not be content and satisfied listening to the same set of opinions over and over, hearing talking points parroted. With wandering and sprawling minds, curiosity tends to get the better of liberals. We on the left are vulnerable to being drawn into the corporate-controlled media environment, just because we’re curious and that is mostly what is available. It takes a lot more conscious effort and intention to look for underfunded leftist media.

Let’s consider some specifics. For instance, according to audience data, a liberal is more likely to watch Fox News than a conservative is to listen to NPR, even though the former is much further right than the latter is to the left; as even NPR is mostly privately-funded (i.e., corporate-funded) and, according to one analysis, gives more airtime to right-wing think tanks (an analysis that was already biased in labeling centrist think tanks, to the right of the American public, as ‘liberal’). To find a leftist equivalent of the extremist rhetoric heard on Fox News, one would have to look even further left to alternative media, but such media territory is a complete blindspot for most conservatives, as well as for many liberals. It’s hard to imagine anyone in the United States who is not intimately aware of Fox News, what it spouts, and the effect it has. It’s strange considering most Americans, on most issues, are to the left of the political elites, including the DNC elite. Yet majoritarian left-liberal views are so silenced in ‘mainstream’ media, even supposed ‘liberal’ media, as to be treated as near non-existent.

This is part of a larger pattern of ideological divide. Similarly, someone on the left is more likely to be familiar with genetic determinism than someone on the right is to be equally familiar with epigenetics, and the same for numerous unequal disparities of knowledge: leftist knowledge of corporate capitalism versus rightist ignorance of Marxism and communism (or even ignorance of the anti-corporatist capitalism of the American founding generation), leftist knowledge of neoliberalism versus rightist ignorance of anarchosyndicalism (or any other similar variations of socioeconomic leftism), leftist knowledge of right-libertarianism versus rightist ignorance of left-libertarianism (despite left-libertarianism being the original meaning of ‘libertarianism’), leftist knowledge of fundamentalist apologetics versus rightist ignorance of pagan parallels in Abrahamic religions (the latter of which was written about by Thomas Paine, the main inspiration for the American Revolution), and endless other examples.

So, one side is always coming to the table with greater familiarity with the other side, but it is not mutual to an extreme degree. Instead of knowledge, right-wing rhetoric turns leftists into inane cartoon characters. In listening to Fox News, one lady we know is always saying how absurd and crazy is the political left, by which is typically meant the DNC elite. Indeed, if one were to mostly watch Fox News and little else, it would be hard to not be shocked by leftist politics that, as portrayed, makes absolutely no sense. But what doesn’t occur to the indoctrinated reactionary mind is that maybe it’s the media caricature, not the target of derision, that is absurd.

Getting to Know the Reactionary Right

Because of a lifetime of such a media environment, and because of being liberal-minded in our curiosity, we have become quite conversant not only with conservative ‘mainstream’ media like Fox News and The Wall Street Journal but also have gained long familiarity with more alternative stuff: Reason Magazine, Epoch Times, Imprimis, etc; along with the websites, blogs, and Youtube channels of religious apologists (e.g., Stephen J. Bedard), racists (e.g., Richard Lynn), white supremacists (e.g., Steve Sailer), genetic determinists (e.g., HBDchick), anarcho-capitalists (e.g., Stefan Molyneux ), and on and on; ad nauseum. Also outside the bounds of respectable society, we’ve listened to the likes of Alex Jones, Stephen Bannon, and Jordan Peterson long before most on the Right had even heard those names.

After seeing him in Richard Linklater’s movies in the early Aughts, it was from Alex Jones that we first learned of the concept of a false flag operation; that was when he had yet to go full Looney Tunes, if he was already teetering on the edge of sanity. As that decade ended, during the Obama administration, Stephen Bannon came out with a documentary on generations theory that we saw; and we quickly recognized it as propaganda. Our parents were watching a lot of Fox News at the time and Glenn Beck became a common presence in our life. On our own, around then or maybe earlier, we checked out the largely unknown Greg Gutfeld on his late show on Fox News, but found it boring; and now he is the new primetime comedian commentator to fill Beck’s absence. It was during that period when we first came across talk of Jordan Peterson, his not having been politicized back then and, instead, mostly known for his 1999 book Maps of Meaning. It was actually a Canadian liberal who introduced us to him; prior to his having embraced the alt-right, having become an IDW (intellectual dark web) figure, and having turned his life into political spectacle.

In the past, we used to actively seek out such interesting and intriguing, sometimes bizarre, stuff and would look into almost anything, as we felt morally obligated and intellectually compelled to understand what was going on in the world, including what was bubbling up in the reactionary mind. At times, depending on our mood, we could and still can be openly curious to almost any alternative view, if sometimes just for shits and giggles. The most extreme paranoid fantasies and rantings, in the more innocent times of decades past, could be taken as mere entertainment; because there was no mass movement and corporate media pushing them to the extent seen now, and certainly there had yet to be a Donald Trump presidency and a MAGA insurrection. Our alternative-loving mentality has had a way of leading us down strange, sometimes dark, paths; a habit we blame on our tender young psyche having been imprinted upon by Robert Anton Wilson and Art Bell; what once were gateway drugs for the curious liberal.

We don’t regret our past explorations. It made possible for us to follow all the lines of influence that eventually formed into the present deranged reactionary right, though it would’ve been hard to have predicted what it was to become in its full glory. We were right there at the beginning and it’s fascinating to think back on it. We came of age in the ’90s and viscerally felt the changes in the air. When still in high school, while down in South Carolina, we’d sometimes catch the early right-wing radio talk shows, such as Laura Schlessinger and Rush Limbaugh, along with occasionally listening to fire-and-brimstone preachers as they can be mesmerizing. Following that, we spent several summers in the Bible Belt region of North Carolina, where we worked at a Christian camp and, also while dating a local girl, got to know far right fundamentalists up close and personal.

All in all, the world of the reactionary right is not alien to us, even as it will always be something outside our own mentality. We’ve lived with it, grasped what it is, watched it develop, felt its impact in our gut, and seen what it does to others. It influenced us as well, if only in determining what we didn’t want to be. Now we’re in a different place in our life. We’ve tried to learn to be more discerning in what we put into our mental space, as we’ve found too much of the crap out there to be torturous and usually pointless, not worth wasting one’s time upon. Concern for mental health required us to stop such bad habits of wide-open curiosity, if we still prize an open mind. Nonetheless, it’s not like we can isolate ourselves. Even now, we know the exact talking points that are popular right at this moment on Fox News. We absorb it all like a sponge, all the more reason to set clear boundaries.

No Shared Knowledge, No Mutual Communication

To get back to the conservative guy we mentioned, for all the above reasons and more, we know where many on the right are getting their thoughts and ideas from, whereas few on the right have any clue about where those of us on the left are coming from. It’s a immense chasm to cross, and so it makes actual and mutual communication a rarity, but it can happen at times and that is what motivates us to reach out to the right-wingers within our personal world. Frustration aside, we do enjoy dialogue with those of other views, and that is why this particular conservative has occupied so much of our attention. When not taken in by right-wing fears, he actually is capable of nuanced thoughtfulness and so talking with him is far from a waste of time. Plus, we simply value our relationship with him on a human level; not everything is about overt ideology.

Because of our larger perspective with a broader knowledge base, we are able to sense our way into his worldview; and so we sometimes can couch our own views in the language, ideas, and frames that make sense to him. Yet he can’t return the favor, as it simply is not in his capacity. Our holding all the responsibility for translation can be tiresome. Even then, only on occasion do we successfully manage to lure him out of his reality tunnel of ideological realism and groupthink. At those times, he is able to be somewhat clear-minded and critical, if only briefly for he soon falls back into a more comfortable stance. The only reason we’ve been able to reach him at all is because the political right is fractured and the cracks offer opportunities for light to shine in, creates weak points to gain leverage and wedge open just enough before the openings snap shut again.

In contrast to his GOP partisanship, we are an equal opportunity critic of the entire two-party duopoly. This is useful in that we can get him to lower his defenses by our attacking the DNC elites, particularly the Clintonistas, of which we despise all the more as they stand in for the entire Left on corporate media spin, while in reality third way politics mostly triangulates itself between the moderate right and the corporate right, with some liberal sugar to help the poison go down. In talking to him, we can segue from such criticisms of Democrats into even harder hitting critiques of the totalizing corruption of both parties within a common power structure that dominates society. This usually works in drawing out his semi-libertarian streak, but his defenses return at the slightest hint of ideological threat. We have to be cautious in not being too provoking, and our success is spotty at best.

Still, we can often get him to agree, surprisingly, with rather leftist views (on the problems of neoliberalism, excessive CEO pay, near monopolies, externalized costs, harmful inequities, culture of trust breakdown, monied corruption, etc). That is as long as we don’t point out that we are expressing leftism. The main challenge is that, no matter what, he will always mentally still be living in the early Cold War. A McCarthyist battle against authoritarian Stalinism and in favor of authoritarian fascism will never end in his Burkean moral imagination, and no non-authoritarian third option is quite possible as a viscerally real choice, despite his being able to intellectually conceive that non-authoritarianism sounds nice as an ideal and in theory. Basically, like most on the reactionary right, he has no actual understanding of democracy or genuine concern about it. How could he when all he hears is anti-democratic rhetoric on right-wing media?

Democracy is just a word to be bandied about and, in reactionary style, defenders of democracy get caricatured as attacking ‘democracy’ (i.e., the status quo of the Establishment). Yet, since he is part of the respectable classes, he can’t admit that he is anti-democratic (i.e., right-wing authoritarian) and anti-egalitarian (i.e., social dominance orientation), if not entirely (like many Americans, he is ideologically schizoid). Such an admission would be politically incorrect, even on the political right. This is the double bind we are caught in as a society. Many individuals can’t openly declare and commit to what they actually value, believe, and uphold. Another obvious example is how racists these days deny being racists, whereas in the past they’d have been proud of their racism, to the point of open supremacism and eugenics. This goes hand in hand with the political right co-opting the label of classical liberalism, while eschewing the ugliness of classical conservatism, but eschewing it in name only.

Reaching Out to the Closed Mind

To this conservative guy, old school neocon President Joe Biden is a communist or else he is a communist puppet under the control of Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders. And the corporatist Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare) is likewise communist, despite it increasing the wealth and power of the private oligopoly of insurance companies, and despite it having originated in a right-wing think tank and having been first implemented by the Republican Mitt Romney (it would make more sense to call it Romneycare). Everything that isn’t far right is communist, or anything that is right-wing but then adopted by the Democratic Party. And whatever you do avoid the topic of postmodern Marxism, a complete oxymoron since postmodernists and Marxists are historically bitter enemies, to such an extent that declassified records show that the CIA intentionally promoted postmodernism to combat Marxist influence. Such facts are irrelevant, though, in speaking to those on the Right.

In not knowing themselves, in refusing to know themselves, right-wing reactionaries know the other side even less and know the larger world not at all. So, lost in such darkness, they are prone to frightening nightmares, where what they project outward is cast back upon them as shadows; with all the shadow boxing that entails, wild punches being blindly thrown and haphazardly landing upon the innocent. Their only sense of the entire Left is a fantastical phantasm that would instantly dissipate in the light of self-awareness, but that would require them to lift it up into open-eyed scrutiny. How does one talk to someone on the Right when their words drop off into empty air filled with the insubstantial imaginings and frightening specters that only they can see? Yet in being part of the same society, how can we not talk to these others, how can we not attempt to reach out? After all, they are our family and friends, our neighbors and coworkers. They aren’t really other, even if that is how they perceive us or rather how the media they consume portrays us.

“You’re the only people alive on the earth today.”

“You’re the only people alive on the earth today. All those people who created traditions, created countries and created rules…they are dead. Why don’t you start your own world while you’ve got the chance?”
~ Bill Hicks.

What is rarely, if ever, taught in public education, much less heard in elite institutions of politics and media, is that this anti-authoritarian demand to be free of the past was one of the main views of the American revolutionaries, including many major leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, having openly defended direct democracy and majoritarianism. They often spoke of this problem as the ‘dead hand’; a criticism applied to any established institution, tradition, custom, norm, law, constitution, or holy book. Freedom is always in the present because it is the only moment in which to act freely. To live shackled to the past, in being beholden to the dead, is to not be truly alive; instead, it’s to be infected with the soul sickness of the zombified living dead. One of the greatest of oppressions is to be haunted by a past that controls one’s mind, identity, and ability to act; held with the vice-grip of commanding voices that possess the victim, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Gríma Wormtongue whispering into the ear of King Théoden of Rohan.

During the American Revolution, the radical advocates for the living generation and living constitutionalism came to be called the Anti-Federalists, only because they lost the war of rhetoric when the so-called ‘Federalists’ took control in dismantling the Articles of Confederation and enforcing centralized government controlled by elites (this kind of radical critique, such as when Bill Hicks speaks it, is now identified as ‘liberal’ or ‘leftist’). But in reality the ‘Anti-Federalists’ were the strongest defenders of actual federalism as decentralized power and self-governance. Levi Preston, a revolutionary veteran, as an old man simply stated what the American Revolution was about, “Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”  He clarified exactly what he meant. Right before that, he said, “Oppressions? I didn’t feel them. I never saw one of those stamps, and always understood that Governor Bernard put them all in Castle William. I am certain I never paid a penny for one of them. Tea tax! I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.” It was not a tax revolt, as if early working class Americans were willing to fight, sacrifice, and die in defense of capitalism. Their sense of freedom denied was much more visceral and communal, with political implications right from the start. They were social justice warriors. They understood that the political is personal and the personal is political.

Such righteous assertion of self-independence, self-autonomy, and self-governance — the Spirit of ’76 living in the Spirit of the People — is not possible if one places the authority of corpses and ghosts over one’s own self-authorization and self-authority, any more than one can be free by submitting to the power of an aristocrat, king, or pope (or dictator, demagogue, etc; or partisanship and lesser evilism). Every living generation, morally and practically, has no choice but to choose for themselves, again and again. Even choosing submission to the dead is a choice of the living and so responsibility for the consequences of that choice cannot be denied. That sense of freedom-loving, almost anarcho-libertarian, independence is why many of the revolutionaries didn’t see the revolution as having ended with the defeat of the British Empire and so continued to fight against corrupt and oppressive elites, including against the plutocratic and oligarchic Federalists (e.g., Shays’ Rebellion); with the Spirit of ’76 never having gone away. Jefferson’s hope and Paine’s promise spring eternal; as evidenced by the thousands of riots, revolts, uprisings, insurrections, protest movements, and mass strikes that have happened since that time.

The colonial working class radicals and revolutionaries weren’t the only ones who bucked against new oppressions replacing the old, even ignoring rare aristocrats like Jefferson. Many others understood or suspected that leading Federalists like Alexander Hamilton were consciously modeling the new ‘constitutional’ republic on the British Empire and the British East India Company, if those like James Madison figured it out too late. These Federalists aspired not to be free but to be the next ruling elite of an even greater global superpower. Such schemes were a real threat, as we can see with what the United States has become, but it’s obviously not like no one saw it coming. Consider moderate and principled Federalists like John Dickinson, initially resistant to revolution at all and later the draft author of the Articles of Confederation, who feared such imperialistic centralized and concentrated power; as expressed in his purse and sword argument (basically, an Anti-Federalist argument; and the Articles did become a touchstone of Anti-Federalist thought). Even the Anti-Federalist Abraham Clark, supposedly the one who suggested a constitutional convention, was unhappy about the results; to such an extent that he warned, “We may awake in fetters, more grievous, than the yoke we have shaken off.” That worry turned out to be prescient, like so many other Anti-Federalist warnings and predictions.

Decades later, Jefferson would admit in private correspondence that the experiment of constitutional republicanism had been a failure because the founders failed to understand the mother principle, that of democratic self-governance. He said that the Spirit of ’76 only lived on “in the spirit of our people“ (and in the “will of the people”; not in the constitution or government), the only hope that the gains of revolution would not be entirely lost. The people, as advocated by the Anti-Federalists, understood the soul of the American Dream better than the elite, as promoted by the faux Federalists. That fundamental conflict is what our country was founded upon and it remains with us to this day. Not even the American Civil War was able to undo that moral corruption and political foundering because there was no one in leadership who was wise enough and brave enough to throw the Ring of Power into Mount Doom when they had the chance, and indeed there were numerous opportunities to course correct, to revive the anti-authoritarian and egalitarian vision of the Articles of Confederation.

None of this is merely about the past but about the ever present choice of each and every new living generation. That is why Bill Hicks’ words resonate with us today, the same reason the words of the Anti-Federalists inspired revolution back then. The authority of those words are not in who said them, be it a comedian or a ‘Founding Father’. The force of those words is in knowing they speak truth for time immemorial, as we can verify that truth in our own minds, hearts, and souls; can observe it, test it, and prove it in our lived experience; can touch it, feel it, and know it in the world around us. The sense of being a living generation of people is not an abstraction but what cannot be denied. First appearing in the Axial Age, there was the notion that all living people, as individuals or communal selves, can have direct access via experience and relationship to ultimate truth, natural law, higher reality, or divine being.

The message of Hicks and the Anti-Federalists is ancient, fundamentally spiritual and religious in nature — as Levi Preston explained, “We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watt’s Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanack.” The point is that they read these texts for themselves, as literacy was becoming common, and so the words were brought to life by their own voices. Rising literacy rates and availability of reading material, including radical pamphlets written by Paine, was the main force behind the revolution of mind that preceded the revolution of government and society. With an emerging independent-mindedness, the once mostly indentured and wretchedly oppressed colonials were gaining confidence in themselves. Unlike in earlier eras, they could read for themselves, interpret what they read for themselves, think for themselves, and so act for themselves.

There was a change not only in mentality and identity, for it was part of an ongoing shift in an entire worldview, a transformation of experienced reality; what first was planted in the Axial Age, took root in the Middle Ages, and finally was coming to fruition in early modernity. It’s a sense of being enmeshed within and inseparably part of a living world. This is what Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God being all around us. And it’s what the 14th century peasants meant, in revolting, when they demanded equality on Earth as it is in Heaven. That is what then inspired those like the Quakers, having come into their own during the radicalism of the English Civil War, to formulate their view of living constitutionalism; the source of John Dickinson’s thinking, as he was raised Quaker. Living constitutionalism, according to the Quakers, treats a constitution as a living document, not a dead piece of paper; for it is considered a compact between a living God and a living community, a specific living generation of people. Ironically, the reactionary right tries to cast shade on living constitutionalism as anti-traditional, when they know nothing of the traditions our society are actually built upon.

No one, not in the past nor in a distant place, can speak to anyone else on behalf of God or speak for anyone else in relationship to God (i.e., the highest truth, reality, and authority). We are all responsible for our own connection to and discernment of the ultimate. This is why natural law, now often co-opted as reactionary rhetoric, could in the past be perceived as radically dangerous in challenging the entire basis and justification for human law, as politically-established and government-enforced. That is what Jesus was invoking in challenging Jewish and Roman hierarchical authority and social institutions, casually dismissing them as if irrelevant with a zealous and charismatic confidence that the truth he knew could not be denied or harmed, no matter what the ruling elite and Roman soldiers may do to his body. In the living moment, he acted on, demonstrated, and proved the truth he spoke; emphasizing he was not special in this manner by telling others that they too were gods, of the Holy Spirit. The living God is not far away in Heaven but here on Earth. The living Revelation is not in the ancient past but right now. The living Word is not in a book but in the world. The living Reality is experienced and known by those with eyes to see, ears to hear.

* * *

Let us make a small note here. We briefly mentioned the reactionary but didn’t go into further detail, as it wasn’t our present focus and we’ve talked about it plenty elsewhere. But as always, it can’t be ignored. What we did mention is how the reactionary has largely co-opted the rhetoric of natural law and so repurposed it to regressive ends. The deeper point, though, is that natural law originated in the radical, not the reactionary. A similar thing can be said of living constitutionalism. Sure, the reactionary can co-opt the social force and political results of living constitutionalism, as it can co-opt almost anything and everything. That is unfortunate, if it also shows the weakness and limitations involved. What the reactionary can never do is co-opt the moral force and motivating essence of natural law, living constitutionalism, and such. That is the beating heart that we are speaking of. The reactionary is always deadening. It is death and brings death to everything it touches, most of all rot of the human soul. It’s love versus fear, vitality versus anxiety, life versus death; but the two sides are far from being equal. One is light and the other mere shadow.

The living moral force of the living truth and reality is inherently and fundamentally radical and forever retains the radical; it is progressive and never regressive, liberating and never oppressive. All that radical literally means is a return to the root; and hence a return to underlying nature, fundamental truth, first principles. That is the point of showing the long history of this shared inheritance of profound wisdom, making clear that the roots of the radical go deep into human nature and human society. Not mentioned at all here is that the notion of a living experience of a living world is rooted even further down into the most archaic layers of our shared humanity, back to bicameral and animistic societies. No amount of reactionary co-option can undo this power. That is because it originates and is sourced within us, individually and collectively. As long as humans exist, the radical living challenge will remain potent and threatening. That is the whole point of why the reactionary feels compelled to co-opt the very thing that undermines it, in grotesquely wearing it like a superficial mask. This is the reason that a probing intellectual, spiritual, and moral discernment is of the utmost.

Yet it’s not only that the reactionary can’t undo the radical for neither can it stop it from spreading. That is precisely what has been happening these past millennia, as a new mentality has been taking hold, beginning as a spark and catching fire again and again. The Holy Spirit is a burning fire, the world aflame in light. The mistake many make is thinking that Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought is merely about a dully simple, reductionist, and materialistic individualism. But that false understanding is because the radicalism of the past has been obscured, as has been the radicalism of Western origins and the radicalism of the American founding. For instance, take the appearance in the ancient world, as if out of nowhere, of the idea that there is a common humanity, a universal human nature, a shared world, a single cosmos. During the Axial and post-Axial ages, that radical understanding came up in the words of numerous prophets, philosophers, wisdom teachers, gurus, and salvific figures. Human identities have grown ever broader over time. The peasantry, in revolting, came to an emergent class consciousness. The colonists, in revolting, upheld the ideal of global citizenship. Such an expanding and inclusive worldview keeps on growing, with each age of tumult bringing us to new understanding and a greater identity.

So, there is what is ancient to human society, even primal in having originated within the human psyche from millions of years of hominid evolution. To experience the living fusion of self and world, human and non-human is the undifferentiated state that forms the baseline of human existence. That isn’t to say differentiation, therefore, is bad; of course not. But starting millennia ago, a divide began to form, a mere crack at first, that has since fractured and splintered into modern psychosis. The radical impulse has never been to resist or deny differentiation that has made possible modern individuality, but neither has it sought to dismiss and devalue the communal identities of the past, the very ground of the bundled mind that we stand upon. Instead, what radical thinkers have advocated is how to transform and reform past communal identities, such that collective health and sanity can be maintained. Abstract identities, however, disconnect us from the living sense of belonging to others and to the larger world. For most of human existence, belonging has meant an identity of tribe built on a deep sense of place. That concrete immediacy and sensory immersion remains essential and necessary. Yet in a globalized interconnected society our ability to perceive a shared living reality is potentially immense; the imaginative capacity to sense, feel, understand, and know that other people are equally real. It’s the task before us, the ancient ideal and aspiration that guides us.

* * *

Roger Williams and American Democracy
Founding Visions of the Past and Progress
Whose Original Intent?
Anti-Partisan Original Intent
US: Republic & Democracy (part two and three)
Democracy: Rhetoric & Reality
Pursuit of Happiness and Consent of the Governed
St. George Tucker On Secession
The Radicalism of The Articles of Confederation
From Articles of Confederation to the Constitution
The Vague and Ambiguous US Constitution
Wickedness of Civilization & the Role of Government
A Truly Free People
Nature’s God and American Radicalism
“We forgot.”
What and who is America?
Attributes of Thomas Paine
Predicting an Age of Paine
Thomas Paine and the Promise of America
About The American Crisis No. III
Feeding Strays: Hazlitt on Malthus
Inconsistency of Burkean Conservatism
American Paternalism, Honor and Manhood
Revolutionary Class War: Paine & Washington
Paine, Dickinson and What Was Lost
Betrayal of Democracy by Counterrevolution
Revolutions: American and French (part two)
Failed Revolutions All Around
The Violence of Bourgeois Revolutions and Authoritarian Capitalism
The Haunted Moral Imagination
“Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America.”
“…from every part of Europe.”
The Fight For Freedom Is the Fight To Exist: Independence and Interdependence
A Vast Experiment
The Root and Rot of the Tree of Liberty
America’s Heartland: Middle Colonies, Mid-Atlantic States and the Midwest
When the Ancient World Was Still a Living Memory
Ancient Outrage of the Commoners
The Moral Axis of the Axial Age
Axial Age Revolution of the Mind Continues
A Neverending Revolution of the Mind
Liberalism, Enlightenment & Axial Age
Leftism Points Beyond the Right and Beyond Itself

Jo Walton On Death

At present, we’re reading a fiction book, Jo Walton’s Or What You Will, and enjoying it. We’ve never read the author before, but plan on looking for more of her writings. This book has elements of postmodernism about it, in how the narrator and some of the characters speak about the story, storytelling, and such; the breaking of the fourth wall. But it’s probably better described as metamodern, the combining of how modernity takes itself seriously and how the postmodern stands back in self-conscious critique, mixed together with experimental playfulness and sincere inquiry; all the while touching on various themes and topics, casual and weighty; but always coming back to what a narratizing voice(s) means, dipping into the territory of the bundled mind.

A focus of concern the author returns to throughout the book is mortality and the desire for immortality; how the human relationship to death has changed over time, how we speak about it and narrate it, and how it shapes us and our culture. Besides comparing present attitudes and responses to earlier times, at one point she contrasts the modern detachment, confusion, and discomfort with human death with the modern ‘extravagant grieving’ over pets. Anyone in our society is familiar with what she is talking about. A coworker of ours, when her lizard died, was so distraught she couldn’t talk about it, to the extent that she became upset when we brought it up, in our trying to be consoling; as we had often talked about her lizard in the past. She was not consoled. It might be the most inconsolable we’ve ever seen anyone about any death of any species.

For whatever reason, we’ve never been that way about death, be it human or non-human; even with a cat we had for more than 20 years, a cat that had sometimes been our sole companion in dark periods. So far, we’ve tended to take it all in stride, with what acceptance we can muster. It’s sad, but so much of life can be sad, if one thinks about it; the world is full of pain and suffering, where death is the least of it and sometimes a blessing. Maybe a lifetime of depression and depressive realism has inoculated us to such things. Death is death. There’s nothing to be done about it, other than to avoid it for as long as is possible and desirable. But as someone who once attempted suicide and used to contemplate it often, we don’t hold it against people who decide to opt out early. Most modern people, though, don’t have this perspective.

p. 111-113:

“If you are a modern person, in our world now, it’s not unlikely that you might not have known the true grief and loss caused by the death of someone close to you until well into adulthood. […] The estrangement from grieving is a change in human nature, and one that has happened over the course of Sylvia’s lifetime. Young people today are not the same as they were when she was young. […] Death comes to them as a stranger, not an intimate. She notices it first in what she sees as extravagant grieving for animals, and then starts to notice it more when her friends lose parents at older and older ages, and take it harder and harder. […] Then she observes a growing embarrassment in younger people around the mention of real death, where people don’t know what to say or how to reaction, until talking about it is almost a taboo. Simultaneous with this came the rise of the vampire as attractive, sexual, appealing, rather than a figure of horror. […] Other undead have also undergone this process in art, even zombies by the first decade of the new millennium. Friends with no religion, who mock Sylvia for her vestigial Catholicism, revert to strained religiosity in the face of death because they have no social patterns of coping.

“Look at it this way: Freud wasn’t necessarily wrong about Thanatos. But he was living in a different world, before antibiotics. His patients were very different people from the people of this century. They would all and every one of them have lost siblings, school friends, parents. […] We read Freud now, and wonder how he could have thought of some of these things, but his patients lived crowded together in houses with one bathroom or none, where they shared rooms with their dying siblings and fornicating parents, and where death was a constant and familiar presence. Nor did they feel grief any less for the familiarity of loss. Read Victorian children’s books; read Charlotte M. Yonge (as Sylvia did as a child in her grandmother’s house) and see what a constant presence death is, almost a character—and not necessarily violent death, but death by illness or accident, inevitable death that simply cannot be cured. We mock their wallowing in woe, the crepe, the widow’s weeds, the jewelry made of jet and hair, the huge mausoleums, the black and purple mourning clothes, until we are faced with our own absences in emptiness, with nothing at all to console us and no signals to send to warn others to tread lightly. […]

pp. 115-116:

“Death in fantasy, is generally defanged. Ever since Tolkien brought Gandalf back, and Lewis resurrected Aslan, both of then in conscious imitation of Christ, and right at the beginning of the shaping of genre fantasy, death in fantasy novels has been more and more negotiable. It’s more unusual for a beloved character to stay dead than for them to come back to life. Death is for enemies and spear carriers, and the way a spear carrier death is treated is that the main characters will have a single dramatic scene of mourning and then rarely think of them once they turn the page at the end of the chapter. Boromir’s death resonates through the rest of The Lord of the Rings but the imitations of it lesser writers put in do not. Tolkien and Lewis lived through the Great War, and saw as much death as anyone has. Their imitators are modern people, whose understanding of death is much less visceral. Modern fantasy, even, and perhaps especially “grim-dark” fantasy, is often written by people without much close-up experience of death. The horror of the Dead Marshes, in Tolkien, comes direct from Flanders field. They are not there for thrills.

“As for resurrections—she goes to San Marco and sees Fra Angelico’s paintings of the angel in the empty tomb, and Christ harrowing Hell and opening the door that has been closed for so long and letting in light where there was only darkness. The easy way people come back to life in fantasy cheapens resurrection. The ultimate mystery of Christianity becomes commonplace, with the extreme version of the cheapening happening in computer games where there can be an actual fixed price in gold for bringing a party member back to life.”