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.
