[pols, curr ev, p/a/s, sj, Patreon] Courage and Other Necessities
Originally posted by siderea at [pols, curr ev, p/a/s, sj, Patreon] Courage and Other Necessities
[Read in black and white]
Oh, my loves. I have so much to tell you.
First, let me own that I, too, am surprised. I thought that the tide had been beaten back, and predicted, with high confidence, that Clinton would win. I was wrong about that, and you would not be remiss in dismissing my further predictions and advice on the grounds that I was wrong about that.
But I still think I know some things.
(I feel like my ears are echoing with every story and song I have ever heard. I feel like all my life I have been being prepared - unwillingly, may I add - for this. In addition to nauseating disgust and chest-tightening sorrow, I find a bitter, bilious laugh in my throat. Ah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this is what you were telling me about, weren't you.)
I have no reassurances for you. My loves, this is going to be bad. Very, very bad.
But what I do have is instruction.
I do not bring balm. I bring weapons.
The one thing the human mind can least tolerate is helplessness. A felt sense of not having any way to avert bad outcomes eats the soul like acid. It is what, research suggests, turns traumatic event to psychological trauma.
You are not helpless. There are things you are helpless to stop: Trump becoming president is one of them, and most of what he and his entourage and his followers will do. But there is so much that still rests in your hands.
I hope to tell you more in the coming days, but right now, these are the meta-level things you need to know.
0.
You will need courage. Courage, the aphorism holds, means "feeling the fear and doing it anyway". To put that more explicitly, courage means a willingness to do things you think necessary and good that have a high likelihood - or certainty - of negative consequences for yourself.
Which is to say that sacrifice is going to be asked of you. Right now many of you - all of you? - are wondering how you are going to protect what you have - what safety, what property, what standard of living you presently enjoy. We will talk about that, too, but understand this: protecting your safety, your property, and your standard of living will not protect liberty, prosperity, or peace; and, worse, frantic heroic efforts to preserve what's yours may simply be futile. Do what you can, of course, but realize now that that you are likely to experience losses, so make them count. You will be deprived of things - at the very least, our economy is about to be gored - so wherever given the option, choose to trade what you must lose anyways for the larger good.
I got this far and (bitter laugh) was reminded by my own words of this, so - thank you, Helprin - let us complete the circle. You will need patience - I've counseled you this before. I trust the utility of this is obvious. But be clear, patience doesn't just mean waiting. Have you wondered why the adjective "patient", meaning one who waits for something, is the same word as the noun "patient", meaning a recipient of medical care? They are the same word, from the Latin word patiens: suffering. A patient is one who suffers. To be patient is to be enduring through suffering.
I'm reliably told we - those who love justice - will need honesty, of which I'm generally a big fan, but the direct applicability is not immediately obvious to me, either. I trust it will reveal itself in due season, and pass it along to you as was given me.
Beyond words written in gold...
You will need to learn to be self-validating - I have so much to tell you about this - and to stop looking to the faces on the glowing screens to tell you what you believe is good and right and beautiful. You are going to have to defiantly believe it ardently in your own heart, and let it guide your steps.
You will need to do this to be effective, yes. But more fundamentally you will need to do this simply to remain sane.
You are going to see people destroyed for believing what you believe and feeling what you feel. Believe it and feel it anyway. You will see the best and brightest - those who represent every noble thing in your heart - humiliated, mocked, reviled, and savaged by gleeful millions before they are immiserated, impecuniated, imprisoned, tortured, or killed. You will see Aslan sheared for yourself. Cherish those things anyway. You will witness your values falling out of fashion - "the minds that I have loved,// The sort of beauty that I have approved, //Prosper but little [...] For arrogance and hatred are the wares// Peddled in the thoroughfares." Hold them anyway.
This is what "faith" really means. Atheists, pay attention! Not merely "trusting without evidence" - that is the shallow modern shadow of the ancient concept. Faith is loyalty to a commitment. Fidelitas: fidelity. Promising oneself to a cause and not breaking that promise; being true to something or someone, uncompromisingly. You will need much faith. Not the faith of believing in supernatural rescue, the faith of being true to what you love.
You will need to love virtue and that which is good in the world very, very much.
1.
In the struggle that follows, you must take on faith that you are not the only one taking action, even when you cannot see your comrades-in-arms in the dark. In the days ahead, much will need to become covert. In case you had forgotten, Trump will have put at his disposal near universal access to all any of us have written or will write on the Internet, and the fruits of many other forms of surveillance, besides, thanks to the ceaseless efforts of the NSA.
So you will need to follow the thread of your conscience and your principles into the labyrinth, even when you don't have company or backup or the strength of numbers; even when you don't have contact with many, or even any, others to encourage you on.
Every liberal, every progressive - yea, every conservative and libertarian, too, for this will not be a regime of traditional values nor of the free market - needs to carve this on their hearts: there are a thousand, thousand battles that must be fought at once. Do not - DO NOT - attack anyone on your side for fighting the "wrong" battle first. By all means: enlist, recruit, cooperate, coordinate, critique, and suggest; if you feel someone on your side betrays our values and fights in an unacceptable way, think hard on it twice and if warranted, let them know. But understand that there is not One Right Way to be doing this, and a sheer multiplicity of efforts is in fact a strength. Call them "cells" if you like; understand it makes us harder to stop when there are more locuses of initiative rather than fewer, and more tactics rather than fewer, more agendas rather than fewer. But the cost of this approach is we will be spread thin, so, for the love of all you hold dear, do not waste time, effort, or money on internecine fighting.
It will be tempting to attack to the left, simply because they will be safer targets and you will have all this fear and rage. Guard yourself against the temptation to unload your suffering on your fellow travelers this way. Not only do you work against your comrades, you pour out your fear and rage on the ground. Your fear and rage are precious resources not to be wasted.
Sometimes your struggles will help in surprising ways. Sometimes they will help in surprising tragic ways. I'm reminded of the plot of P.K. Dick's Radio Free Albemuth. Per Wikipedia: In this alternate history, the corrupt United States president Ferris F. Fremont (FFF for 666, ‘F’ being the 6th letter in the alphabet) becomes Chief Executive in the late 1960s following Lyndon Johnson's administration. The character is best described as an amalgam of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, who abrogates civil liberties and human rights through positing a conspiracy theory centered on a (presumably) fictitious subversive organization known as "Aramchek". In addition to this, he is associated with a right-wing populist movement called "Friends of the American People" (FAPers).
The President's paranoia and opportunism lead to the establishment of a real resistance movement [...]
Fremont eventually captures and imprisons Dick and Brady after the latter attempts to produce and distribute a record that contains subliminal messages of revolt against the current dictatorship. Brady and Silvia are executed, and Dick narrates the concluding passage about his life in a concentration camp, where his supposedly latest work is actually penned by a ghost writer and regime-approved hack. Suddenly, however, he hears music blaring from a transistor radio which contains the same subliminal message. He and his friends, it turns out, were just a decoy set up by VALIS to detour the government from stopping a much more popular A-List band from releasing a similar record with a better-established recording company. As Dick realizes this and hears youngsters repeating the lyrics, he realizes that salvation may lie within the hearts and minds of the next generation.
Please remember that sometimes even in failure we win. The only way we can pull off such daring successes is by different efforts working in ignorance of one another - not coordinated, but emergent, acting in trust that someone else is out there, struggling too.
I cannot emphasize this enough: your own efforts may not look successful, but may prove the decoy that protects the effort that is. Your efforts may not lead directly to the desired outcome, but may hold the center while others flank the enemy. You efforts may force the opposition to capitulate to another allied group, or open the Overton window such that some other group can get through it.
2.
Some of you are wondering, anguished, what you could possibly do to help. Oh my loves, this war - the long game - is going to be fought, most critically, with words and songs and ideas. We will need artists, and writers, and philosophers, and preachers.
That's, honestly, how this war has always really been fought.
If you don't know what to do with yourself, for the love of light, make art.
3.
If I may be so bold as to self-recommend, you're going to need to understand, really understand, the Two Moral Modes. This is not just about racism, not just about sexism, not just about homophobia, xenophobia, anti-semitism, islamophobia, etc.
The other half of the country hungers to subjugate. They want to conquer - and they're not fussy whom. They want to conquer, both as a nation state - that's much of what "great" means to them in "make American great again" - and in their personal lives.
This is important first off because if you just anticipate aggression coming along known axes of oppression, you are going to get blindsided.
But even more critically, there is no durable way of fighting any of these mindsets without directly attacking the underlying Mode 2 moral justification for them. We are watching unfold right now the consequences of addressing sexism, racism, homophobia, etc without addressing Mode 2 moral reasoning: advances against specific bigotries are like words written in sand, and when the tide rises, they are washed away.
(Sure would have been nice if we had managed to pass the ERA.)
4.
We liberals are going to have to learn to be a lot more conservative. I don't mean we have to change our principles. To the contrary, to protect our principles we will have to shift to a mindset of conservation. It is conservation values - such as courage, sacrifice, patience, honesty, and faith, as mentioned above - which will be most salient to us. Add in duty, tradition, propriety, dignity, and the very concepts of "virtue", "value", "principle", and "morality".
There is a moral side in this, and it is not theirs.
Now would be a great time to start getting over any lingering discomfort you might have with certain ancient abstractions you mostly think of coming from the Right's lips. The Right doesn't own them and we should reclaim them.
5.
This is going to be hard. I don't know how bad it's going to get, but right now, I can't identify very many potential brakes on the process that's about to unfold.
I don't want to panic you. I suspect you're already probably doing a good job of that, yourself. What I want to do is alert you. Don't sing yourself lullabies. Don't go back to sleep. Stay woke.
And take an attitude that you need to prepare for what is coming. You may not know what specifically to do yet, but remember that you're smart and have many sources of information available to you. You'll figure it out - if you turn to face it with resolve to do.
I've sketched out here in this post an attitude to take towards the dark days coming that will serve us well, both personally and societally. It is not an easy attitude to adopt. I think many of you may find it foreign, and no little bit off-putting - like putting on a bulletproof vest for the first time, of ugly necessity.
But now is, I think, the time for spiritual bulletproof vests.
I believe even deeply terrible things may be grappled with, productively, with the right attitude: by choosing to face them dead-on rather than ignoring them, by choosing to make plans and take deliberate action rather than neglecting the future and getting stuck in the past, by choosing to think deeply and act swiftly rather than avoiding what makes one uncomfortable, by choosing to honor feelings rather than stuffing them.
I do believe we're about to find out if I'm right.
SHARE THIS. SHARE THIS. SHARE THIS.
Link for sharing: http://siderea.livejournal.com/1318963.html?format=light
This post brought to you by the 111 readers who funded my writing it - thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.
Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post - unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!
[Read in black and white]
Oh, my loves. I have so much to tell you.
First, let me own that I, too, am surprised. I thought that the tide had been beaten back, and predicted, with high confidence, that Clinton would win. I was wrong about that, and you would not be remiss in dismissing my further predictions and advice on the grounds that I was wrong about that.
But I still think I know some things.
(I feel like my ears are echoing with every story and song I have ever heard. I feel like all my life I have been being prepared - unwillingly, may I add - for this. In addition to nauseating disgust and chest-tightening sorrow, I find a bitter, bilious laugh in my throat. Ah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this is what you were telling me about, weren't you.)
I have no reassurances for you. My loves, this is going to be bad. Very, very bad.
But what I do have is instruction.
I do not bring balm. I bring weapons.
The one thing the human mind can least tolerate is helplessness. A felt sense of not having any way to avert bad outcomes eats the soul like acid. It is what, research suggests, turns traumatic event to psychological trauma.
You are not helpless. There are things you are helpless to stop: Trump becoming president is one of them, and most of what he and his entourage and his followers will do. But there is so much that still rests in your hands.
I hope to tell you more in the coming days, but right now, these are the meta-level things you need to know.
0.
You will need courage. Courage, the aphorism holds, means "feeling the fear and doing it anyway". To put that more explicitly, courage means a willingness to do things you think necessary and good that have a high likelihood - or certainty - of negative consequences for yourself.
Which is to say that sacrifice is going to be asked of you. Right now many of you - all of you? - are wondering how you are going to protect what you have - what safety, what property, what standard of living you presently enjoy. We will talk about that, too, but understand this: protecting your safety, your property, and your standard of living will not protect liberty, prosperity, or peace; and, worse, frantic heroic efforts to preserve what's yours may simply be futile. Do what you can, of course, but realize now that that you are likely to experience losses, so make them count. You will be deprived of things - at the very least, our economy is about to be gored - so wherever given the option, choose to trade what you must lose anyways for the larger good.
I got this far and (bitter laugh) was reminded by my own words of this, so - thank you, Helprin - let us complete the circle. You will need patience - I've counseled you this before. I trust the utility of this is obvious. But be clear, patience doesn't just mean waiting. Have you wondered why the adjective "patient", meaning one who waits for something, is the same word as the noun "patient", meaning a recipient of medical care? They are the same word, from the Latin word patiens: suffering. A patient is one who suffers. To be patient is to be enduring through suffering.
I'm reliably told we - those who love justice - will need honesty, of which I'm generally a big fan, but the direct applicability is not immediately obvious to me, either. I trust it will reveal itself in due season, and pass it along to you as was given me.
Beyond words written in gold...
You will need to learn to be self-validating - I have so much to tell you about this - and to stop looking to the faces on the glowing screens to tell you what you believe is good and right and beautiful. You are going to have to defiantly believe it ardently in your own heart, and let it guide your steps.
You will need to do this to be effective, yes. But more fundamentally you will need to do this simply to remain sane.
You are going to see people destroyed for believing what you believe and feeling what you feel. Believe it and feel it anyway. You will see the best and brightest - those who represent every noble thing in your heart - humiliated, mocked, reviled, and savaged by gleeful millions before they are immiserated, impecuniated, imprisoned, tortured, or killed. You will see Aslan sheared for yourself. Cherish those things anyway. You will witness your values falling out of fashion - "the minds that I have loved,// The sort of beauty that I have approved, //Prosper but little [...] For arrogance and hatred are the wares// Peddled in the thoroughfares." Hold them anyway.
This is what "faith" really means. Atheists, pay attention! Not merely "trusting without evidence" - that is the shallow modern shadow of the ancient concept. Faith is loyalty to a commitment. Fidelitas: fidelity. Promising oneself to a cause and not breaking that promise; being true to something or someone, uncompromisingly. You will need much faith. Not the faith of believing in supernatural rescue, the faith of being true to what you love.
You will need to love virtue and that which is good in the world very, very much.
1.
In the struggle that follows, you must take on faith that you are not the only one taking action, even when you cannot see your comrades-in-arms in the dark. In the days ahead, much will need to become covert. In case you had forgotten, Trump will have put at his disposal near universal access to all any of us have written or will write on the Internet, and the fruits of many other forms of surveillance, besides, thanks to the ceaseless efforts of the NSA.
So you will need to follow the thread of your conscience and your principles into the labyrinth, even when you don't have company or backup or the strength of numbers; even when you don't have contact with many, or even any, others to encourage you on.
Every liberal, every progressive - yea, every conservative and libertarian, too, for this will not be a regime of traditional values nor of the free market - needs to carve this on their hearts: there are a thousand, thousand battles that must be fought at once. Do not - DO NOT - attack anyone on your side for fighting the "wrong" battle first. By all means: enlist, recruit, cooperate, coordinate, critique, and suggest; if you feel someone on your side betrays our values and fights in an unacceptable way, think hard on it twice and if warranted, let them know. But understand that there is not One Right Way to be doing this, and a sheer multiplicity of efforts is in fact a strength. Call them "cells" if you like; understand it makes us harder to stop when there are more locuses of initiative rather than fewer, and more tactics rather than fewer, more agendas rather than fewer. But the cost of this approach is we will be spread thin, so, for the love of all you hold dear, do not waste time, effort, or money on internecine fighting.
It will be tempting to attack to the left, simply because they will be safer targets and you will have all this fear and rage. Guard yourself against the temptation to unload your suffering on your fellow travelers this way. Not only do you work against your comrades, you pour out your fear and rage on the ground. Your fear and rage are precious resources not to be wasted.
Sometimes your struggles will help in surprising ways. Sometimes they will help in surprising tragic ways. I'm reminded of the plot of P.K. Dick's Radio Free Albemuth. Per Wikipedia: In this alternate history, the corrupt United States president Ferris F. Fremont (FFF for 666, ‘F’ being the 6th letter in the alphabet) becomes Chief Executive in the late 1960s following Lyndon Johnson's administration. The character is best described as an amalgam of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, who abrogates civil liberties and human rights through positing a conspiracy theory centered on a (presumably) fictitious subversive organization known as "Aramchek". In addition to this, he is associated with a right-wing populist movement called "Friends of the American People" (FAPers).
The President's paranoia and opportunism lead to the establishment of a real resistance movement [...]
Fremont eventually captures and imprisons Dick and Brady after the latter attempts to produce and distribute a record that contains subliminal messages of revolt against the current dictatorship. Brady and Silvia are executed, and Dick narrates the concluding passage about his life in a concentration camp, where his supposedly latest work is actually penned by a ghost writer and regime-approved hack. Suddenly, however, he hears music blaring from a transistor radio which contains the same subliminal message. He and his friends, it turns out, were just a decoy set up by VALIS to detour the government from stopping a much more popular A-List band from releasing a similar record with a better-established recording company. As Dick realizes this and hears youngsters repeating the lyrics, he realizes that salvation may lie within the hearts and minds of the next generation.
Please remember that sometimes even in failure we win. The only way we can pull off such daring successes is by different efforts working in ignorance of one another - not coordinated, but emergent, acting in trust that someone else is out there, struggling too.
I cannot emphasize this enough: your own efforts may not look successful, but may prove the decoy that protects the effort that is. Your efforts may not lead directly to the desired outcome, but may hold the center while others flank the enemy. You efforts may force the opposition to capitulate to another allied group, or open the Overton window such that some other group can get through it.
2.
Some of you are wondering, anguished, what you could possibly do to help. Oh my loves, this war - the long game - is going to be fought, most critically, with words and songs and ideas. We will need artists, and writers, and philosophers, and preachers.
That's, honestly, how this war has always really been fought.
If you don't know what to do with yourself, for the love of light, make art.
3.
If I may be so bold as to self-recommend, you're going to need to understand, really understand, the Two Moral Modes. This is not just about racism, not just about sexism, not just about homophobia, xenophobia, anti-semitism, islamophobia, etc.
The other half of the country hungers to subjugate. They want to conquer - and they're not fussy whom. They want to conquer, both as a nation state - that's much of what "great" means to them in "make American great again" - and in their personal lives.
This is important first off because if you just anticipate aggression coming along known axes of oppression, you are going to get blindsided.
But even more critically, there is no durable way of fighting any of these mindsets without directly attacking the underlying Mode 2 moral justification for them. We are watching unfold right now the consequences of addressing sexism, racism, homophobia, etc without addressing Mode 2 moral reasoning: advances against specific bigotries are like words written in sand, and when the tide rises, they are washed away.
(Sure would have been nice if we had managed to pass the ERA.)
4.
We liberals are going to have to learn to be a lot more conservative. I don't mean we have to change our principles. To the contrary, to protect our principles we will have to shift to a mindset of conservation. It is conservation values - such as courage, sacrifice, patience, honesty, and faith, as mentioned above - which will be most salient to us. Add in duty, tradition, propriety, dignity, and the very concepts of "virtue", "value", "principle", and "morality".
There is a moral side in this, and it is not theirs.
Now would be a great time to start getting over any lingering discomfort you might have with certain ancient abstractions you mostly think of coming from the Right's lips. The Right doesn't own them and we should reclaim them.
5.
This is going to be hard. I don't know how bad it's going to get, but right now, I can't identify very many potential brakes on the process that's about to unfold.
I don't want to panic you. I suspect you're already probably doing a good job of that, yourself. What I want to do is alert you. Don't sing yourself lullabies. Don't go back to sleep. Stay woke.
And take an attitude that you need to prepare for what is coming. You may not know what specifically to do yet, but remember that you're smart and have many sources of information available to you. You'll figure it out - if you turn to face it with resolve to do.
I've sketched out here in this post an attitude to take towards the dark days coming that will serve us well, both personally and societally. It is not an easy attitude to adopt. I think many of you may find it foreign, and no little bit off-putting - like putting on a bulletproof vest for the first time, of ugly necessity.
But now is, I think, the time for spiritual bulletproof vests.
I believe even deeply terrible things may be grappled with, productively, with the right attitude: by choosing to face them dead-on rather than ignoring them, by choosing to make plans and take deliberate action rather than neglecting the future and getting stuck in the past, by choosing to think deeply and act swiftly rather than avoiding what makes one uncomfortable, by choosing to honor feelings rather than stuffing them.
I do believe we're about to find out if I'm right.
SHARE THIS. SHARE THIS. SHARE THIS.
Link for sharing: http://siderea.livejournal.com/1318963.html?format=light
This post brought to you by the 111 readers who funded my writing it - thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.
Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post - unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!