Last week, I went over the extensive case against right-wing activism. It predictably drew a lot of attention. I deliberately left out the case for alternatives, which I will now outline here. Much like the term “activism” really refers to an umbrella of similar and related activities, the alternative to activism is an umbrella of […]
Source: How To Passivism – Social Matter
My buddy AntiDem sent me the above and asked for comment. It’s Thursday morning. I’m in my usual midweek of overnight cab driving funk. I feel like shit. I’ll be ok. Thursday is hump day for me. My initial comment? The answer, it seems, is to be Essenes or Anabaptists.
There is no innovation in a hermetic withdrawal from the larger society. Call it a cabal or whatever, it is again an attempt to have the law of Abraham without the wisdom of the church. It is not innovative or cool.
When faced with an incompetent, oppressive or genocidal emperor there are a few choices. You can fight be added to the mass graves of all the other early revolutionaries. You can shut up and hope to stay off the radar. That’s not safe either. Quiet resistance still runs the risk of being discovered and then you too become bug food. Then there is the Essene and Desert Father answer–run away and hide. Go somewhere inaccessible to the king and start your utopia removed from the Empire. There are Anabaptists among us who coexist but disengage with us as much as possible. The Anabaptists will tell you that for all their effort at staying insulated from us the larger world intrudes. Smartphones have a way of invading
There are folk in Alaska who live there precisely because it is as far from Washington D.C. and the bougie world of the Northeast as they can manage while still holding a US passport. The itch to find a virgin patch of ground and a bunch of sympathetic friends with the goal in mind of creating a more perfect society pops up every once in a while. My ancestors looked out at the horizon in Ireland and Scotland and believed that God was calling them to get on a boat and come to the New World. We know how that went.
In my 20’s I was in love with this epiphany: that changing the geographic landscape does not free you of your internal, spiritual landscape. The demons that torment you will follow you whether you make a tropical island hermitage your paradise or a fifth floor walkup in Harlem. My ancestors brought their hot mess with them on the boat. It flowered on the shores of the New World.
I’m not sanguine when it comes to considering this country’s next hundred years. The Empire is too large, too incapable to survive another century. If you are my son’s age and worry about your legacy and retirement your best move is to buy some land and live on it. The people that will do best when it all goes to shit are those who have land and can farm. Us, who live in the city, are going to be fucked. That said, and until the Zombie Apocalypse happens, we are still here and still have to live with each other. It doesn’t take a Cabal or ten acres and ten friends living communally. It takes some simple traditions we already know. America thrived in its first century because we knew how to be neighbors. People did for each other.
One of the great sins of progressivism is the destruction of the habits of community. Progressivism taught us to rely on large enterprises and institutions. Community control and management became government control and management. Perhaps because of a centuries deep suspicion of us, of Christians and a concomitant belief that we’d be better if we were more deeply secular. So, many things were wrestled from the hands of the church and given to Uncle Sam in the name of progress. We traded pimps. Instead of being bitches for the little “c” Catholic Church we became bitches to our Pimp Daddy Uncle Sam and now, can’t get free. We desperately want to be free of Pimp Daddy Sam’s authoritarian lock on our lives.
So, run and hide. Find another patch of virgin ground, bring some friends, and tell Pimp Daddy Sam to leave us the fuck alone. Make your tree house where the girls are excluded, your mannerbund or cabal and because you are isolated from Pimp Daddy Sam and the girls are gone, you are good, no? No. First, as any Amish can tell you, the world has a way of leaking into your cabal. Second, without women the cabal will all die off in this generation. The progenitors will be the first & last. You have to let the women in and deal with their shit. Next, all the hot mess, all the reasons you can’t coexist in the city, that shit doesn’t go away because now you live in Utah. You are not free of your crap.
Christians lived for a few hundred years under the feet of Caesar. We were brutally hunted, tortured and killed. Around the world today are house churches that thrive in the face of a dedicated effort to wipe them out. We know how to exist in a parallel life along with Roman citizens of the first world of the USofA. We have known for at least two millennia that the revolution has to start within. All that makes us a hot mess has to be surrendered to God and let die. The new kingdom’s foundation stones are each of us as we transform ourselves into salt and light. It is still true over two-thousand years after a no-account carpenter from Nazareth was crucified along with two other dissidents. No cabal needed.