Cult of Death

Cult of Death

Is it still a “free” country if everybody does what they’re told? If you do only what the society and the advertising and the church and the rules tell you to do, if you never materially, objectively step over any line, are you free?

You may be content to live within dictated bounds, content to think in terms of what is “normal,” but freedom is something else. Sure it is worth fighting for, but fighting, in the commercial sense of the term, where our army wipes out their villages in order to preserve our prosperity, does not produce anything I would call freedom, or anything I would call worth fighting for.

Freedom comes in two forms: it is either (1) an empty word that serves to keep the herd in the pen and focused on their assigned tasks, or (2) a peak experience that keeps calling you back. Type One freedom is what we encounter most frequently, in the form of freedom to choose laundry detergents, freedom to choose which channel to watch, freedom to attend the church of your choice, freedom to vote for either of two candidates, both of whom are funded by the same corporations.

Type Two freedom is something else. It is a woman living in a tree for two years, so the logging company can’t cut it down. It is walking through a forest, when the smells and the sounds and the sensations of a chilly morning are more real than your job or your car or your debts or your name. It is writing, when you lose track of time and place and forget every detail of your temporal existence and just let the words flow to the page. Type Two freedom is that Chinese guy standing in front of all those tanks. 

Far from being a legislated form of social order, Type Two freedom consists in breaking the rules, following the spirit, acting without permission. It flies in the face of reason, flies in the face of the profit margin, and flies in the face of wisdom. Our stifled souls scream for it, but instead of taking a firm stance on an important issue, instead of taking the risk of actually being alive, we settle for taking a trip to the mall. “Boldness,” as Thoreau said, “has genius and magic in it.” Or, as Sir Walter Scott put it, “One hour of life crowded to the full with glorious action and filled with noble risks is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum.” When the meek inherit the earth, will it be only the grave?

Freedom is neither fought for nor legislated, it is taken in the teeth when the opportunity presents. And opportunity presents every day. Every minute. We know as we surf the web, or as we watch TV we know that Life is someplace else. Life, Freedom, God, Peak Experiences, these are with us always, but starved, impoverished. We hear their cry, in the form of that silenced scream in our choking heart. We hear it. We hear the scream when we learn that the food aid being sent to Africa is almost entirely from genetically modified crops, and nobody knows what will be the long term effects of eating that stuff. We hear the scream when we bypass a newspaper article about school funding, or about meals-on-wheels, or the latest mass murder headline. The scream comes up from our soul, and in wordless horror it asks us, begs us to rise to the challenge, to do something, for God’s sake. But we turn the page and look for news less depressing to read about. Sports, maybe. That was your chance, passed by day after day, your chance to live. Life is against he rules. The cult of death is far easier to follow. Just sit there reading the news and everything will be fine. Go to church and recite the same empty prayers and everything will be fine. But really believe? Materially and objectively demonstrate true belief in those words from Christ’s lips, and act on faith? That might make your preacher nervous. Don’t take the risk. What’s the good of it? 

I’d like to have a chance to talk to the man who stood in front of those tanks at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. Nobody ever took down his name, except perhaps in the book of life. He vanished in the crowd. Where is he now? What can he tell me about peak experiences? Or that Buddhist monk who, back in ’63, incinerated himself to protest the Diem government in Vietnam, the government America had installed there. What would he have to say about freedom? Would he express regret? Would he say it might have been wiser to just go with the flow? Get a house and a car, get a job in a plant that produces I-Pods and retire comfortably? Or would he maybe say that his only real taste of life was that single moment, that three terrible minutes of absolute self-discipline when the flames made every nerve in his body scream with agony, but he held his position, never flinching at the worst pain imaginable, in order that his life could mean something. Would he regret that act, or would he see it as a peak experience, three minutes of real life that he wouldn’t trade for all the laptops in China? The man who stopped the tanks, does he wish he’d just walked on home, minded his own business? Or does he instead look back and reflect upon that single moment as having been the defining act of his life, three minutes when he really existed, before he blended back into the shadows of mass culture? Jesus! Is that not worth the price of cutting the umbilical cord?

You want to make America strong? Legislation won’t do it, aggression won’t do it, and corporations won’t do it. What the nation needs is women who will climb up into trees and not come down till the bulldozers retreat. We need men who will stand in front of tanks.