An Emancipation Proclamation, Part I
“In the caves
All cats are grey”
- The Cure
Everyone is a slave. You, me, your boss, your spouse, your kids, your parents, your senator, your president… everyone.[1] I don’t simply mean “slaves” to physical laws, to market forces, to demographics, to statistics, to nature, to nurture, to the good opinion of our fellows: I mean we’re all slaves, every last one of us, in the most basic of all possible ways, and our eyes are playing tricks on us when in fact, every cat in the dark is grey.
Am I wrong? What is a “slave,” then? This might be more profitably answered by asking what a slave’s opposite is, because surely that’s what We, the People, are. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, someone who is sovereign is someone who is “self-governing; independent.” A sovereign, then, is someone who is not only free in her thinking, but also free in acting on what she thinks. And one crucial element missing from the common conception of freedom is the capacity for duration. A slave can hack at a shackle once, with little effect; but hacking at the shackle, sufficiently repeated, will result in freedom from the shackle. And, the sovereign stays free.
To take a completely arbitrary example, someone possessed of sovereignty might say to herself: “I will think of nothing but grey cats all day long, continuously, no matter what else happens,” perhaps by way of remembering to feed her grey cats Bruno and Fred at the end of the day, perhaps as prelude to composing a recipe for Grey Cat Gumbo; and then she would proceed to actually think of nothing but grey cats all day long—despite any distraction or contingency that might arise. In point of fact, neither you nor I nor anyone not trained in meditation or lacking the concentration of an Olympic athlete could maintain the thought of “grey cats” (and nothing else) for even one minute, let alone an entire day.[2] Go ahead, try it right now. And even the experienced meditator or athlete would be hard pressed to keep it up for a whole day, while, strictly speaking, a true sovereign could choose a single thought and think nothing else for the remainder of her life.
Well, yeah, that sounds completely stupid. Why would anyone want to do that? What would be the point? A sovereign is beholden to nobody, so she owes you nothing, not even answers. But the above thought experiment is instructive for the fact that we are accustomed to thinking that thinking is easy, the easiest thing imaginable. If one can’t even control one’s thinking—one’s own subjective reality—how much less, then, can one control one’s actions in the face of an objective, outer reality? Given this set of circumstances, what then of one’s accomplishments, even the greatest of which is no greater than the vector sum of multiple scattered thoughts, each most likely held for no more than a few seconds at a time? It’s a matter of adopting a perspective aimed from Truth, much like the Sun outside of Plato’s famous cave; and a hint of the magnitude of what I’m outlining can be found in an aphorism from Herman Hesse’s absolutely superversive[3] novel Demian: “Whoever wants to be born, must first destroy a world.”
Everyone is a slave because nobody can act with freedom, because nobody can think with freedom, because nobody can think—much less act—with duration. Is our apparent freedom, then, like the furtive shadows in the cave, a complete illusion? Perhaps not entirely: we’re free to choose our slavery. Or to put it another way: given an unlimited set of limiting options, we’re free to choose the best, the least limiting option. “But… isn’t that what I’ve done?” How can you be sure? How long have you thought about it?
To be continued…
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Footnotes
[1] Excepting Tracey D., whose benevolence to us, her blogger slaves, is mystifying by how undeserved it is.
[2] One might argue that any artist can and does concentrate her thought for a much longer period than a minute, often for the better part of a day; but to this the sovereign would no doubt answer in a snit: “Your creation is a fetish around which your thought crowds like flies, and my thought is subject to no fetish, nor even to any impulse or capacity arbitrarily grafted onto me at birth by a power beyond my control.”
[3] My thanks to my seminarian friend Michael P. for this neologism, which is the antonym of “subversive.”
nice, though I don’t fully agree. I’m not sure that “not acting with freedom” constitutes a state of slavery. No performed act can ever be performed in exactly the same way twice, if for no other reason than the act will be temporally different the second time. Any performance, then, is always already resisting any attempt at enslavement, and following many contemporary performance scholars, we are always already performing. Sure, “the system” may constrain me, but my presence and action within the system constrains it and forces it to act as well. Only when we forget that our actions effect the actions of the system, or as Tracey D might say, “the dominant paradigm,” are we actually enslaved.
Hi Ari, thanks for your thoughtful comments.
Certainly active existence as a sequence (i.e., in time) precludes carbon-copy acts, no disagreement there. But to attribute to this a resistance to slavery sounds too much to me like ex post facto law: in other words, there’s nothing we can do about it, so let’s view it in benign terms. And while that’s valid in a certain sense and limited to a certain context (the same point of view adopted, for instance, by certain ancient Greeks like Pythagoras who saw in “limit” a form of liberation), it doesn’t hold up within a context where the sole criterion of freedom is the reign of volition: if I want to perform carbon-copy acts, being prevented from doing so, even by time itself, is de facto submission to a power outside oneself, and in the binary logic I’ve deliberately adopted, that amounts to slavery.
It will no doubt be objected that positing a slavery from which there is and can be no apparent egress is fatuous, but I believe there is the possibility of egress, no matter how remote, by virtue of the fact that knowledge is based most fundamentally on identity. However in order to identify with, for instance, the Absolute, or that which is above all conditioning of time and space, one must first possess certain of those earmarks of liberty which pass unnoticed in the usual discourse. In this brief essay I’ve isolated the capacity for duration as one of those; another is the capacity for intensity – in other words, the ability to visualize a thing with sufficient force as to be able to “sense” that thing with the mind just as surely as our five senses relay the evidence of an ostensibly objective world to us. Dreams are a particularly good example of every human’s ability to do this; but the object is to invoke this capacity at will, rather than be at its mercy and only at certain times beyond one’s control.
In this sense, the enslaving “dominant paradigm” which is in question isn’t a certain political system or another, but rather Philip K. Dick’s paradigmatic definition of reality as “that which doesn’t go away when one stops believing in it.”
[...] I wrote not too long ago, we’re all slaves, and one reason is because we’re all 100% subject to this eternal economy of rise and fall. [...]
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