Mystic Revolution

“We are living in a particular phase of history: freedom itself is bringing forth compulsion and constraint. The freedom of Can generates even more coercion than the disciplinarian Should, which issues commandments and prohibitions. Should has a limit. In contrast, Can has none. Thus, the compulsion entailed by Can is unlimited. And so, we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. Technically, freedom means the opposite of coercion and compulsion. Being free means being free from constraint. But now freedom itself, which is supposed to be the opposite of constraint, is producing coercion. Psychic maladies such as depression and burnout express a profound crisis of freedom. They represent pathological signs that freedom is now switching over into manifold forms of compulsion.”

Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics

“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

“Why, why, why can’t I

Seem to hold my head up high?

It must be the devil in my ear.

I’m not good enough, so what’s the use,

Self medicate and self-abuse?

It must be the devil in my ear.”

Red Clay Strays, Devil In My Ear

In this essay I wish to offer a sort of fugue of Ethics; a comparison between freedom-as-compulsion and freedom-as-ideal. These two are in tension at present, and it seems that you are either on one side or the other. We find ourselves in a particular cultural moment that is defined, ostensibly, by excess freedom. As an American, and especially as a Texan, I can see clearly how pervasive the myth, the epic, the hero-tale of freedom really is. We are born into it, raised in it, bred to believe it with every fiber of our being: life, liberty, and the pursuit of freaking happiness. Freedom is life. However, freedom was never meant to be a philosophy of life in itself, though it seems to have become just that. Freedom as an ideal is weightless without being borne up by a supporting metaphysics, or at least an understanding of what freedom requires: self-governance.

Byung-Chul Han points out the danger inherent in a culture that emphasizes freedom without foundation. In the very first chapter of Psychopolitics, entitled “The Crisis of Freedom,” he writes:

“Today, we do not deem ourselves as subjugated subjects, but rather projects: always refashioning and reinventing ourselves. A sense of freedom attends passing from the state of subject to that of project. All the same, this projection amounts to a form of compulsion and constraint- indeed, to a more efficient kind of subjectivation and subjugation. As a project deeming itself free of external and alien limitations, the I is now subjugating itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimization.”

This freedom that we so often praise is a directionless freedom; an soul-anarchy sort of freedom. He calls this state of affairs the “neoliberal achievement society.” He says this:

“People who fail in the neoliberal achievement-society see themselves as responsible for their lot and feel shame instead of questioning society or the system. Herein lies the particular intelligence defining the neoliberal regime: no resistance to the system can emerge in the first place. In contrast, when allo-exploitation prevails, the exploited are still able to show solidarity and unite against those who exploit them. Such is the logic on which Marx’s idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat is based. However, this vision presupposes that relations of repression and domination hold. Now, under the neoliberal regime of auto-exploitation, people are turning their aggression against themselves. This auto-aggressivity means that the exploited are not inclined to revolution so much as depression.”

This reality can be expressed in a variety of ways: the commodification of the self, the dark side of capitalism, even the proverbial cart and horse; because the issue is not freedom, it is the placement/prioritization of freedom before/without a metaphysics or guiding ethic. Therefore, it leaves people with a feeling of inadequacy because, though they have the opportunity to become all they can be, they have not acted upon it. Herein lies the problem with “hustle culture”: it is the demand to become better for its own sake, to act in freedom as the highest ideal, rather than what I would propose, that it is the byproduct of an ideal.

It is here that I will begin the counterpoint, introduced by Emerson. He writes this in Self-Reliance:

“Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is a man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world- as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from a man to his actions…. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after our own, but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

And that is what we find now: a culture of expiation, of penance. The religious metaphor goes further, as we look about and find the world huddled around digital rosaries, praying before the god of transparency, confessing before the world the details of their lives. As freedom is the highest ideal we possess, we must atone for our lack of action, our lack of self-optimization. Freedom proves to be a fickle god, however. Freedom is, after all, what Satan promises. “You will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Does this not imply that Adam and Eve will be free from ignorance, free from a poverty of knowledge? Therefore, will they not be free from the imposition of the God who has that knowledge? It has been said that knowledge is power; therefore wouldn’t the knowledge of good and evil grant the highest power?

So they eat the fruit, and, dare I say, “seize the means of production,” but are not free. The freedom that Satan promises is akin to our notion of freedom: freedom in se, in itself, without any guiding power. To use one of my favorite phrases, he is a closet authoritarian, an ugly Robespierre. He is an anarchist until the powers are overthrown, and then he’s a dictator. His promises do not hold up. God, on the other hand, promises an entirely different sort of freedom.

Consider the craftsman. Any craftsman must begin with a simple task, and then move forward to more complex tasks. It is absolutely necessary, as any craftsman can attest, that one who desires to attain mastery of a craft must submit themselves to it in extreme humility. The carpenter will fail the first time he builds a chair; the mechanic will not be able to diagnose the problem with the first vehicle he encounters. But in learning the craft, one must relinquish everything, even the desire to master that craft in the pursuit of mastery. The self must fade away, leaving only attention to what is at hand. The more he works at his craft, the more proficient he becomes, and therefore the more free he is to craft what he may choose.

My thesis is this: that true freedom can only be achieved by submission to a greater ideal. It is this attitude of submission that has been eroded by society and government, creating what Matthew B. Crawford (who I will quote at length later) calls “mass solipsism.” What I will get into is this: where modernity urges the individual to throw off transcendence and thought structures in a postmodern rage, the history of great people demands dedication to a path. Where society commands the individual to assimilate freedom to the self, true freedom demands assimilation to something beyond yourself. This is a mystical reality, in some sense. Freedom and slavery go hand in hand. As Jocko Willink frequently says, “Discipline equals Freedom.” To be free, you must devote yourself to a Way. Our current way of life is diametrically opposed to such thinking. Crawford, writing in his excellent work The World Beyond Your Head, says this:

“After World War II, revulsion with totalitarian regimes of the right and left made us redouble our liberal commitment to neutrality. But this stance is maladaptive in the context of twenty-first century capitalism because, if you live in the West and aren’t caught up in battles between Sunnis and Shiites, for example, and if we also put aside the risk of extraordinary lethal events like terrorist attacks in Western countries, then theeveryday threats to your well-being no longer come from an ideological rival or a theological threat to the liberal secular order. They are native to that order.”

In other words, in the absence of an external foe, we have an ethos of freedom with nothing to free ourselves from. I am an avid fan of H.P. Lovecraft, but he was perhaps at his finest when he said, “From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent.” The irony of this particular Zeitgeist-horror is that, as Han points out, we have become slaves to our ethos of freedom. Yet while we ask something of our fickle freedom, true freedom asks something of us.

If you were to do a survey of heroes, you would find people who serve an ideal. Gawain has his five-points emblazoned on his shield, reminding him of the virtues for which he fights. Beowulf, even when he is a king, operates under the ideal of service, and lays down his life for the sake of the village. Frodo and Sam strive to preserve the goodness they see in the world, and even Harry Potter knows he must win because while Voldemort fights only for himself, Harry has something worth fighting for outside of himself. Freedom, true freedom, relies on dedication to something extra nos– otherwise it is chaos. This is what it asks of us.

Furthermore, freedom not only requires a code, but it requires tripartite strength: physical, mental, emotional. If one is not physically strong, he will not be as capable. If one is not mentally strong, he will not have the ability to push through hard things. And if one is not emotionally strong, the world will be a tyrant, and autonomy will slip away on the river of time. Strength of any type produces capability, and with capability, purpose, and with purpose, steadfastness. With this steadfastness comes freedom; freedom to lift others up, freedom to relinquish the concepts of pain and pleasure, freedom to control what you can, and leave to others what you can’t.

The warrior ethic has the potential to provide a guiding ideal. As Emerson says in his essay on Heroism,

“Our culture therefore must not omit the arming of the man. Let him hear in season that he is born into the state of war, and that the commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collected and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and life in his hand, and with perfect urbanity dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech and the rectitude of his behavior.”

In other words, your neighbor needs you, the hero, the honorable man or woman who is ready to serve. We live amongst a proliferation of the domestic, the canned, the mass-produced. In the midst of the plastic world, however, there are a few who still follow the ancient path, the warrior ethic, defined by service, strength, and honor. It is anti-modern, it is not cool, it is anachronistic, and it is beautiful in the deepest sense, because it hearkens back to the truth that we cannot be free in isolation. True heroes sacrifice, and one cannot sacrifice without something to sacrifice for. In a world that demands self-isolation, walled in the solitary confinement of the screen, we dwell in the company of those who walk with us, and the ancients who came before us. “Greater love has no man than this- that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)

In other words: you are not your own, and therefore you are not alone.

To quote Han from Psychopolitics again:

“As the entrepreneur of its own self, the neoliberal subject has no capacity for relationships with others that might be free of purpose. Nor do entrepreneurs know what purpose-free friendship would even look like. Originally, being free meant being among friends. ‘Freedom’ and ‘Friendship’ have the same root in Indo-European languages. Fundamentally, freedom signifies a relationship. A real feeling of freedom occurs only in a fruitful relationship- when being with others brings happiness. But today’s neoliberal regime leads to utter isolation; as such, it does not really free us at all. Accordingly, the question now is whether we need to redefine freedom- to reinvent it- in order to escape from the fatal dialectic that is changing freedom into coercion…. It is interesting to note that Marx also defines freedom in terms of a successful relationship to others: ‘Only in community [with others does each] individual [have] the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.’ From this perspective, being free means nothing other than self-realization with others. Freedom is synonymous with a working community (i.e., a successful one).”

Therefore, not only does service provide a guiding ethic, but it makes self-realization possible, because service cannot take place without community. In self-realization, we find self-actualization.

It is for this greater cause, the cause embodied by your brother and sister, that you must be strong. True freedom begins when you throw off the chains of the “dictatorship of transparency,” as Byung-Chul Han aptly calls it; throw off the bondage of the opinions of men, and begin to follow the path of discipline, of service, of fortitude, of peace. It will not be easy, but at the end of the day there is no easy path. There are, however, good paths, paved by the steps of the warriors who have gone before.

The warrior ethic is deepened and strengthened by our Christianity. We recognize that the Way is not a thing, but a person. It is Christ, in whom we live and move and have our being. He is the source of our freedom, our peace, our strength. He is Love. It is therefore in submission to Him and to the path, watered by the blood of the saints, that we become free; free from sin, free from smiling Death, free from self. As we confess our Creed, demons cry, realizing their failure and witnessing the ascendance of our souls to communion with our Dragon-Slayer king. As Martin Shaw puts it, prayer is a clearing in a dark forest, and it is in this clearing, under clear-eyed stars, that we kneel before God. Satan wants to convince us that service to Christ and others is bondage, and that true freedom is freedom for the self. Yet when we look at what happens when freedom is the ultimate ideal, service to Christ seems to be the better option, because it yields freedom of the soul. It is, in fact, this freedom that yields what Kierkegaard calls “the teleological suspension of the ethical,” or, more accurately, a teleological shift to a higher ethic, an ethic formed by the will of God. Kierkegaard makes the case in Fear and Trembling that Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac because God had told him to, and therefore there was a “teleological suspension of the ethical,” a dismissal of ethics for a greater purpose. In some sense, this was the case. However, it is not truly a suspension of the ethical that took place, but rather a transfer, a shift to the ethic of love. Abraham loved God enough, and therefore trusted Him out of this love, that he was willing to do whatever was commanded, because he knew God is Love. He became free, because he loved God absolutely. He was in submission to His will. In this same way, the will of God is truly a harbor for our wayward souls, because it renders the tumult around us the mere workings of God’s plan. Thus we become knights of faith, relinquishing what we cannot control to God and becoming free, truly free, living by the ethic of love laid out for us by Christ. “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.” (Romans 13:10)

Contrary to the freedom that is found in submission, then, is freedom for the self, not freedom from the self. That is the mark of this dystopian pseudo-freedom: it is freedom for the desires, because, for the modern “sovereign” person, desires are law. This is why we require 24/7 Whataburger and 2 day Prime delivery: I must not be hindered from getting what I want because we have reduced personhood to desire. Therefore, if you desire is countermanded, the self is wounded. This is especially evidenced in the LGBTQ community: a person is summarized, you could even say abbreviated, down to their sexual preferences, in other words, their desire. This is the hallmark of the revolution of the last five years. A true freedom, however, is exactly the opposite. It is freedom from desires, a state called zen, or nirvana, or whatever you want to call it. It is release from the bondage of wants, rendering the soul deeply content. Content, but not complacent. As the soul begins to submit to a higher ideal, a state of contentment does not hinder, but rather assists the soul in striving for strength. Contentment solidifies the foundation from which the soul takes flight. Thus the man is formed from the wreckage of the self and all its trappings, rising out of the ash and becoming a new creation. This radical freedom turns the eyes away from the self and onto others, who are the true mission.

The glory of true freedom is that it is remarkably simple. Love one another. Submit yourself to love. It is not easy, but it is truly simple. There is hope in that, and freedom cannot exist without hope. Therefore- let us be heroes today.

Let us love today.

It is in this, we shall be free again.

We must recognize as well that issues with the freedom ethic lead directly to issues in governance. History has shown us that a vacuum of governance cannot exist, and despite the legion of news anchors parroting the word “unprecedented” over the past 5 years, we find nothing unprecedented about current affairs; the problems are merely exacerbated by the proliferation of technology. To quote Matthew B. Crawford again from his book The World Beyond Your Head:

“…one of the things you learn in studying the history of politics is that power is consolidated by eliminating intermediate structures of authority, often under the banner of liberation from those authorities… [Tocqueville] shows that the idea of absolute sovereignty was not an ancient concept, but an invention of the eighteenth century that was made possible by the monarch’s weakening of the “independent orders” of society- self-governing bodies such as professional guilds and universities. The [French] revolutionists inherited this (fairly recent) centralization of power from the monarchy, and now defended such centralization as the guarantor of liberty against all intermediate forms of social authority (the kind exercised by independent associations). The ideal of total liberty required total centralization of power, now in the name of the people. Today it is the vanguardist disrupters at Google who promise to deliver us from parochialism. If Polanyi is right about how scientists and other thinkers are formed, then to weaken the local authority of teachers and traditions that embody “personal knowledge” is a bad idea, on both epistemic and political grounds.”

I would go one step further than Crawford, in that it is not only multinational tech companies that are promising freedom, but the State as well. As I have written elsewhere, the way we operate at present is in the State’s best interest. We are not self-governing, we are not disciplined, because we have no hope. We have that to thank for the welfare state and for all other philanthropic government initiatives. We have set the stage for authoritarianism. It is this poisonous idea of freedom as the highest ideal that is, in fact, taking our freedoms away.

Perhaps, in my writing, you have heard me advocate for a return to, as Han says, “the disciplinarian Should;” in other words, an immobile society in which one is born into their role. I think this system has it’s benefits, but that is not what ought to happen. I think that it is not the Should that we should strive for, but the thin border between Can and Should, brightened by hope and walked with courage. Let us, in hope, recognize that we can become better- and have courage to do what we know we should do. It is a balance, found and followed by self-governance.

There is no easy path in this life. At this junction, it is up to us to choose whether we will take the hard path of pseudo-freedom which is really thinly masked slavery, or true freedom with all its accoutrements of blood, sweat and tears. There is a calling before us: a calling to something higher, greater, more beautiful; something beyond the toxicity of modernity. Something ancient,something deeply real. I think, for the sake of our neighbors, our families, and our children, it is time we answer that call.