“If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.”
—Mother Teresa
Lately, I think a lot about raising my family - and going forward - differently. Could it be that I, an athiest Jew from New Jersey, am seriously contemplating the Benedict Option?
Wikipedia: “…The idea of a "Benedict option" involves finding the communities in which virtuous life can flourish, since Dreher argues that the existing culture has already forsaken the virtues.”
I’m certainly looking for something that includes local community. I want to show my children how important it is to cultivate spiritual fortitude, value the scientific method over “faith” in science, cultivate MANY useful, beautiful, and legitimate ways of investigating and understanding the world, and favor discussion over censorship. I want to find examples of places and organizations where checks and balances are actually functioning to prioritize personal, community, and ecological health rather than supporting increasingly enormous and shaky power structures underbraced by extreme inequities. I want my children to grow up in community, and to treasure the friendships that develop when each party is committed to Not Screwing People Over.
But especially: I want my kids to play, be outdoors a lot, explore and honor and be awestruck by and laugh about our world, and do Kid Things without always having to justify and explain and prove Why Kid Things Are Important. I have lost any remaining hope in the possibility of the USA achieving anything closer to democracy than its current existence as a corporate oligarchy…so I’m not totally sure what to tell my kids about Government Politics apart from: Fasten Your Seatbelts and Avert Your Eyes…while deeply appreciating the courageous possibilities outlined in the Serenity Prayer.
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
—Jurassic Park
Fascinatingly, my social circle of close friends - though now nearly entirely dispersed around the country and the world (the local Benedict Option is what I seek in addition, at the moment!) - is more philosophically diverse than it has ever been. I count republicans, democrats, socialists, libertarians, independents, and anarchists among them. They include Christians, Jews, atheists, Buddhists, and members of other spiritual faiths. My friends come from a variety of economic and cultural backgrounds, and have a variety of occupations, vaccination statuses, and life stories.
I have still so far failed to find existing homeschooling and “alternative education” organizations that resisted the diktats over the past three years, and which I had hoped would illustrate a better way forward for my children. With some exceptions, my former progressive, liberal, socially-conscious homeschooling community no longer espouses the ideals that inspire me.
What is left, after rejecting so much?
My hope is that someday soon there will be a sea change, and maybe progressive anarchists and others will begin calling out and therefore diffusing the power of what Paul Kingsnorth calls “The Machine”. Liberals and others will cancel covid restrictions and 95% of the rest of the bureaucracy besides! Everyone will be busy for quite some time, unraveling the mess we have embedded ourselves in, but we’ll be gentle with ourselves and take our time, keeping our eyes on the ultimate goal: thriving human communities, locally focused, every one different and therefore requiring fewer and fewer centralized Sets of Rules! Doctors and holistic healers and regular people will rip off the goddamn masks! Republicans and Democrats will recognize that bikeshedding about “hot button issues” is way more divisive and exhausting and useless than working together to deal with the important things that we all care about, plus there exists more than two ways to think about things! We will all recognize that real “health” “care” involves so very much more than political wrangling and corporate profiteering, and we’ll get busy reclaiming Bill Gates’ chemical farming nightmare into a regenerative agriculture experiment, the likes of which the world hasn’t seen in thousands of years!
Hey, a mom can dream, can’t she??
Merriam Webster: “anarchism - a political theory holding all forms of governmental authority to be unnecessary and undesirable and advocating a society based on voluntary cooperation and free association of individuals and groups.”
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I feel that we have tipped past the point of no return on the macro level. The world - its defining myths, narratives, and structures - will fall apart without my help.
Charles Eisenstein
To give up hope for and attachment to our society’s old stories - that weren’t working well even before 2020 - occasionally gives me a profound sense of both peace and purpose.
I want to show my children alternative ways of existing within a rising tide of authoritarianism. I want to diffuse the grip of those technocratic influences that threaten the existence of our communities, the health of the earth’s systems, and the worth of our personal lives. I want to get better at choir directing, and I think intergenerational singing groups embody what is awesome about human existence. Matthias Desmet calls our personal projects “parallel structures,” and the heartening thing about these is that they are revolutionary acts at a human scale.
Especially while reading Desmet’s work, I am less inclined than ever to believe that there are malevolent, evil people trying to ruin the world - difficult and twisted as it is to imagine, the most corrupt bureaucrat or CEO is likely to believe that s/he is working for good. And I am understanding for the first time that a ruling elite does not necessarily create totalitarianism - rather, the totalitarian system itself can create a ruling elite. Therefore, eliminating the ruling class, even if it were possible, would not remove the Problem. Also, fearsome and powerful though the current power structures are, they are actually quite brittle, which is why it’s worthwhile to keep speaking up and finding each other.
I don’t think it follows that those who commit immoral acts should be excused based on Lack of Free Will (“Your Honor, I was hypnotized!! Plus, Life Isn’t Fair and I Wanted A Bigger piece of the 99%”), nor allowed to continue their despotism, and regardless of its organically grown origins, I am strongly against totalitarianism. I believe that there is right and wrong in an absolute moral sense, regardless of political or religious doctrine. Therefore, I think that dangerous and terrible things are being perpetuated by humans in the name of political and economic power, and that it is very important to elucidate why and how these things are dangerous and terrible in order to shine light in the darkness. Or maybe the important thing is to remember to laugh. Really, all the things that are real and human and precious both strengthen us, and weaken totalitarianism.
I want my kids to understand why it is so important to avoid othering. And to set boundaries. And to remember that 1984 was a parable, with direct analogies to, rather than specific descriptions of, the challenges of our time.
I guess I need to “stop going to the hardware store for milk,” as one of my friends so wisely reminds me, and teach my children thusly: it’s time to look beyond the people and institutions I used to think I depended on (sob! This is very hard to do), and appreciate the individuals who are coming together to - as the saying doesn’t go - help the Phoenix rise before more ashes are burnt. I can offer no epiphanies, but solidarity in spades.
I want to connect with other people, laugh at the insanity, host “cultural exchange” home visits for our teens, build Parallel Structures, move near each other (where are the vibrant pockets of community near you??), and let our kids play together. Let’s keep building actual social networks, and reclaim our personal and collective health, and build communities based on shared work, homemade food, music, regenerative agriculture, art, healthy home-building and -making, and rediscovering nothing less than our humanity.
“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”
—Mahatma Gandhi
That mirror analogy is a strangely two-way street, both intimidating and inspiring. I am carrying it with me into 2023, while I hold a new resolution: feel my feelings, and let go of bitterness. Holding onto it characterized more of my emotions over the past three years than I wish. I don’t yet know what and whom I can trust, and this liminal state is difficult to explain to my children.
I still tell my kids that we are members of the counterculture. I add that I am truly politically homeless, and will never again vote for a candidate based on their party affiliation: I must find evidence of a candidate’s humanity and moral fortitude else I pass on voting at all. I no longer believe that big government in the USA will ever work for the people - the bloated one we have is too rotten and corrupt. I tell my kids that I hope the government can be dismantled and decentralized in a miraculously speedy and peaceful way, while I simultaneously try to settle in for the long haul in case Whatever Happens Instead is less pleasant and occurs on a time scale outside of my lifetime.
I have lots to say to my kids these days on the topics of morality and right and wrong, the non-postmodern specifics of which I believe will be more important than ever in their personal lives.
What I seek is an uneasy peace: to simultaneously work enthusiastically for what’s right, while acknowledging that the pace of societal degeneration is accelerating. I must find moments of peace for the sake of my children, to help them and myself find our place in this world.
My dream is for our children to navigate this suffocating political and economic system without becoming enslaved to a two-parents-working-grind; for our grandchildren to never even encounter addictive, health-destroying, immune-system-disabling preposterously-termed processed “foods”; for our great-grandchildren to be born into a time when endocrine disrupting Forever Chemicals and disposable plastic packaging are antiquities of a bygone era; and for our great- great-grandchildren to have so VERY many more important and fun things to do than consume entertainment and advertising, thereby relegating propaganda to the status of Quite Difficult To Dispense.
I want it all, right now, for all of us. There is work to be done, and I am ready to find out what it is.
(I intended this essay to mark the end of a beginning. See you on the barricades!)
“What is left, after rejecting so much?”
…
>>>I know, right?! People truly will like you better as a mindless sheep instead of as an intellectual wet blanket 😂
(whiny voice) “Thinking’s just too hard!”
…
“Merriam Webster: ‘anarchism - a political theory holding all forms of governmental authority to be unnecessary and undesirable and advocating a society based on voluntary cooperation and free association of individuals and groups.’”
…
>>> I can read this as the Land of Spiritual Make-Believe -or- I can read it as unwittingly or intuitively hearkening back to our native, pre-civilized form of small band/ small tribe hunter-gatherer governance.
…
“‘I feel that we have tipped past the point of no return on the macro level. The world - its defining myths, narratives, and structures - will fall apart without my help.’
Charles Eisenstein”
…
>>> I’ve been phrasing this kind of sentiment as “The Iron Age has finally ended, Thank God! The curve of the trajectory of our species’s technological + moral co-evolution is right now at an inflection point, furthermore the sharpest inflection point ever.
(But which way will the curve go? Up or down? 😂🤣)
…
“Especially while reading Desmet’s work, I am less inclined than ever to believe that there are malevolent, evil people trying to ruin the world - difficult and twisted as it is to imagine, the most corrupt bureaucrat or CEO is likely to believe that s/he is working for good. And I am understanding for the first time that a ruling elite does not necessarily create totalitarianism - rather, the totalitarian system itself can create a ruling elite. Therefore, eliminating the ruling class, even if it were possible, would not remove the Problem.”
…
>>> I disagree. Yes, they are evil. They are deluded, but that does not excuse their evil.
And most of us Workin’ Stiffs lie somewhere between stupid and evil.
Otherwise, agree. We cause them to exist more than they cause us to exist. “We have met the enemy, and they R us.”
The enemy are the crabs that pull us down back into the pot as we try to escape. They are adult in years, but their reasoning was fossilized at an adolescent stage of black ‘n’ white thinking. These are the lower 33%, hopeless, who can never un-learn the brainwashing. It’s the middle 33% that can be awakened from their mindless crablike Unexamined life. So, it’s with them that Good Men’s hope lies 😂, the (whiny voice) “but thinking’s so hard” crowd.
Maybe we got lucky this time, with RonaMania. In 2020 I feared that I & my family wouldn’t be able to avoid the shots. I worried that the middle 33% could be wakened only by events on the scale of a Dresden-style firebombing - but that still the lower 33% wouldn’t ‘get it,’ not even as they were chipping mortar off of old bricks in order to reuse those bricks to rebuild the city.
…
“That mirror analogy is a strangely two-way street, both intimidating and inspiring. I am carrying it with me into 2023, while I hold a new resolution: feel my feelings, and let go of bitterness. Holding onto it characterized more of my emotions over the past three years than I wish. I don’t yet know what and whom I can trust, and this liminal state is difficult to explain to my children.”
…
>>> Trust the people who’ve earned it & deserve it.
…
“I no longer believe that big government in the USA will ever work for the people - the bloated one we have is too rotten and corrupt.”
…
>>> This might indicate that you are a Constitutionalist, possibly a Conservative. There are atheist & homosexual Conservatives, by the way, and furthermore Conservatives who don’t call themselves Republican.
…
“I tell my kids that I hope the government can be dismantled and decentralized in a miraculously speedy and peaceful way, while I simultaneously try to settle in for the long haul in case Whatever Happens Instead is less pleasant and occurs on a time scale outside of my lifetime.”
…
>>> My kids aren’t old enough to hear this part yet, but I’ve told it to my wife, “Taking a cue from history (Roman Empire, British Empire), sometimes life is easier on the periphery of an empire than back home in the Motherland.” So, that’s why I asked my wife to follow me back to her native Japan.
Otherwise, we were going to drop out & “return to the land” as best we could.
…
“What I seek is an uneasy peace: to simultaneously work enthusiastically for what’s right, while acknowledging that the pace of societal degeneration is accelerating. I must find moments of peace for the sake of my children, to help them and myself find our place in this world.
My dream is for our children to navigate this suffocating political and economic system without becoming enslaved to a two-parents-working-grind; for our grandchildren to never even encounter addictive, health-destroying, immune-system-disabling preposterously-termed processed “foods”; for our great-grandchildren to be born into a time when endocrine disrupting Forever Chemicals and disposable plastic packaging are antiquities of a bygone era; and for our great- great-grandchildren to have so VERY many more important and fun things to do than consume entertainment and advertising, thereby relegating propaganda to the status of Quite Difficult To Dispense.”
…
>>> They call it the Curse of Awareness for a reason, Plato’s Cave, or Cassandra’s fate. The curse is one of loneliness. That’s why you have to ‘find God,’ one way or another, so that you can survive psychologically & morally as you’re building the Ark while all the sheeple are laughing at you.
This is what Intensive Agricultural Civilization does to people. It perverts our nature in definable, predictable ways. Salvation, likewise, is definable & predictable, regardless of language, creed, & color. “The more things change the more they stay the same” has been true for 5,000+ years of Intensive Agricultural Civilization because plant-centered dieting was unavoidably predicated upon slave labor - all the way up until 19th century hydrocarbon technologies, hence 19th century socialistic idealism, hence this most remarkable “inflection point” that I’m talking about: the End of the Iron Age, **finally,** phew! 😅
What’s next? Either a Star Trek-style socialistic utopia? wherein the biological wild-type Human Spirit is actually cultivated by our technology? instead of suppressed by it? -or- a Borg-like, 1984-like utter domestication of our species, totally breaking our Spirit, in the manner of chickens & sheep?
The latter implies that actually our species failed to survive the End of the Ice Age during which we evolved physiologically & psychologically. It’d imply that grass-centered dieting did not save us after all, nor did our gods of the domesticated cereal grains save us. In some future fossil record, Intensive Agricultural Civilization will be assessed as our species’s death throes: a 10,000-year tragic end-of-life experience with chronic malnutrition, chronic overwork, & inescapable madness after the loss of our native food source & our native way of life, which was Earth’s now extinct Pleistocene terrestrial megafauna, under which conditions We became Us.
And We still are that Us 👍🙂❤️
Building the Ark, in scientific terms, just means waking up to who ‘n’ what we are, physiologically & psychologically.
Thanks,
Gerald