A Quilt of Reckoning
Every week, every day brings new revelations to light, of how the world works in formerly mysterious ways. Of how power corrupts, absolutely. Of how important is the sanctity and sovereignty of the individual, and the actual (more than the virtual) human community—even as our information largely comes filtered through the digital lens.
How to make useful sense of it all? How is making sense itself useful, if all the levers of pragmatic action are captured by senseless forces of power, or worse, conscious abuses of power, which we rightly call evil?
As I take heart in the shared awakening—fact by fact, insight by insight, revelation by revelation—making sense and sharing sense becomes its own justification, as a store of potential energy to use, as individual will and universal serendipity determine. Will any resulting action be useful, effective, helpful, healing? In the process is the remedy. The sensing of truth and sharing of that sense—even digitally—is a natural process, part of our integrity as parts of the organic whole.
We neither despair nor place hope in limited plans of action, but take life’s instruction to participate, to receive and give back. In such spirit, in the midst of apparently earthshaking, historic challenges and counterbalancing tides of awakening, I offer the following fragments of understanding, glimpses of sense and senselessness, to stitch a fragmentary mirror, a patchwork quilt, select samples of reckoning.
The Primal Individual
‘What we have to learn from the free individual, either the primal man in the woods, or the primal-hearted genius in the studio, is just that; his individuality. One of the most important characteristics of free people, often overlooked, is that they are, qualitatively speaking, utterly unique.’ —Darren Allen
In the Face of Power
“Nothing can temper the spirit of a warrior as much as the challenge of dealing with impossible people in positions of power. Only under those conditions can warriors acquire the sobriety and serenity to withstand the pressure of the unknowable.” —Carlos Castaneda, The Fire from Within
Sovereignty on Trial
‘All across the Western world, regimes are converging on the same form of authoritarian managerial technocracy, treating popular sovereignty with disgust and brooking no dissent. New legislation in Canada proposes life in prison for “hate speech.” Britain already arrests hundreds of people per year for holding the wrong opinions. Germany’s interior minister says right-wingers who “mock the state” will be preemptively ejected from the financial system, have their business licenses revoked, and be banned from traveling. At the behest of the E.U., Poland’s new “centrist” government has cast aside the rule of law in order to arrest political enemies and purge the Right from all institutions.
‘Some of these countries have written constitutions, others don’t—it hardly matters. What they all share, along with the United States, is a near-identical ruling class of transnational managerial elites who believe they alone possess History’s mandate to reengineer society. And what they hate and fear above all else is the nation: the existence—and yes, the very idea—of a distinct and sovereign people that lies beyond the reach of their totalizing hunger for conformity and control. Hence, they hate and fear democracy, too—the self-governance of a nation. This global battle between transnational managerialism and sovereign democratic nationhood now defines 21st-century politics.’ —N. S. Lyons
Beyond Good and Evil
‘The falsest judgments… are the most indispensable for us;… without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world… without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live… renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life… a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.’ —Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Prejudices of Philosophers
Learnings from Life
What is life but a series of learnings, of tests and passages? Past each obstacle, or stopped for good—what lesson can be gleaned, for safer passage in future, for self and others?
The fabric of timespace changes, too, along with allies and the competition; so nothing is ever guaranteed. It’s a game of inches, and playing the odds.
Here are some of the things I’ve learned that spring to mind, past and present lessons with future value…
Listen to the body.
Make ends meet.
Cherish freedom.
Be kind.
Open the channel.
Look within.
Step outside.