Shred your flags and knit dishrags from them.

Have you ever wondered why there are certain people that this society elevates to positions of status, power, and wealth? Leave aside any ideas you may have about karma, luck, etc. and just focus on social psychology/economics. What is going on when fools such as George Bush and Donald Trump are able to rise to such positions? It certainly isn’t because they are such consummate manipulators of crowd psychology. We ourselves gave them this power, we must be somehow wanting such people in the limelight. We love loud show-offs—they make us laugh. It feels good to laugh in a group, just as it feels good to roar with anger in a group. We are really no different than a group of chimpanzees where the dominant males and females rule their tribe with the judicious use of food gifts and sexual favors. But we are dangerous chimpanzees—we exist in huge numbers and form huge groups. A chimp can always wander off into the forest if he doesn’t get along—but we have cut off all the forests and we arrest forest-squatters. We react strongly when the Tribe is threatened from outside, but we are leery of ideas to which none of our elevated leaders have signed on. Very few of us are confident enough to not only think for ourselves, but to act on it. We should treat Ted Kaczynski as a prophet, crazy yes, but possessed of something few of us have--the ability to function as an outsider. (I definitely don’t condone his killing those letter openers—I would have used paint bombs.) Why do we feel such a deep need to be on the winning side, to rally behind the team, to wave flags and cheer so loud when Bret Favre completes a pass, what explains the delirium at political conventions? Why were there millions of flags sold in September 2001, more millions of those stupid car magnets sold in 2003, and no mention of Earth Hour in today’s paper? We obviously have an extremely strong group need to raise certain of us to such positions and then rally behind them, content to no longer really think about where we are going, abrogating our true task and duty to keep searching for truth and growing in ourselves.


In several of her many books, Ursula K. LeGuin imagined a future society of truly democratic pastoral communities, living in touch with the land, all issues of gender equality long since worked out, where small was beautiful and there was no longer a possibility of any person or group exercising raw power over any other. I think many of us have this sort of world in the backs of our minds when we imagine what it is going to take to save humanity. There is a world-wide movement afoot of Intentional Communities which is attempting to re-define the way humans live in hopes of coming to terms with some of our inherited traits which have become dysfunctional in the modern crowded world. Some people are starting to grapple with the problem that, if we want to continue to live on this planet, it is no longer possible for humanity to exist in this crowd culture which elevates “leaders” on the basis of what is really just sublimated sexual attraction.

But, given who we are, a lineage of apes crazily over-evolved to take advantage of resources and control them for the benefit of our group, would humans ever be able to become something new? I really wonder if it is possible to overcome hard-wired genetic behaviors and create a new society. Certainly if survival depended on it, we would evolve. . .or are we so dysfunctional we will just extinct ourselves? The knowledge that humanity is not well served by traditional power roles and crowd/tribal, them-against-us modes of behavior is not new. The monastic movement started by St. Benedict in about 530 AD was a response to perceived abuses of power in the church and community. Benedict never intended to start a world-wide Benedictine Order, but that’s what happened. He had something in mind more like Ursula K. LeGuin’s world, but human social psyche is hard to change. Methods of rising to positions of power soon arose in the monastic groups, just as in almost all human groups. And the abuse or non-abuse of such power became dependent only on the personality of the power-holder and was therefore open to tragic cases of abuse if the wrong power-seeker surmounted the structure, just as in all human groups. I lived for a time in an intentional community in Japan in the 70’s (though we had never heard that term—we called it a commune.) After less than one year it dissolved into bickering about who was in charge and how money resources were being allocated. We were not evolved enough yet to live with our bodies what we had in our heads imagined possible. Are any of us, yet?

We have a lot of work to do. It’s getting really late. Turn off your lights tonight at 8 PM.