Emanuel Pastreich
Independent Candidate for President
Those interested in revolutionary change should not be so worried about what they will achieve in the next six months. They should think more about the suffering of others, about those who are starving and dying, and less about their own retirement accounts.
We should not die foolishly and we should be as wise as possible in our strategic decisions. At the same time, clinging to things, or clinging to life itself, can keep us from achieving our full potential which is so clearly demanded by the current situation.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo (山本 常朝) suggests in his diary Hagakure 葉隱 that if one wishes to achieve a difficult task, facing death in the case he described, that an effective method is to imagine that one is already dead. The reason being that at the moment one accepts death and having no possessions, or even the ability to possess, suddenly one is swept over by a wave of immense freedom. Giving up on that clinging to life means that one can focus on the essential and not be caught up in the details.
Such words are critical to us now as the powers we associated with the truth movement, and the progressives in the American political system are being rapidly reduced to the hand puppets of techno-fascism and militarism.
What do we do? Do we make some sort of a deal with these people who have lost their moral vision, and their consciences as well?
Or do we gain more by taking a stand, right here, right now?
As Hillel the Elder said, “If not now, when? If not me, who?”
If we do our absolute best, and do so with little concern for ourselves, that action in itself will impress people whom we do not even know, whom we have never met, and they will do great things that we are not able to do.
Whether we succeed is not that critical--although it would be nice. What is critical is that the goal of a peaceful and sane society can be achieved by someone.
As Confucius wrote so many years ago,
德不孤，必有鄰
"Integrity is never isolated and alone. There will always be those who are sympathetic out there"
What he meant was that if you take an action that is selfless and ethically motivated, even though it appears as if you are entirely alone, spurned by all, there will always be those, somewhere out there, maybe even among those who appear to be your oppressors, who will be sympathetic to your position.
Although this strategy is not effective for raising big money from lobbyists, or getting on corporate TV, I would argue that it is the only effective approach we have today. In fact, it is more effective than going through the degrading and demoralizing process of trying to run for office.
When John Brown and his followers in 1859 formed a provisional government that followed the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they declared, without any concern for what passed for public opinion, that, according to the Constitution, slavery is not a peculiar institution but is rather a war of the landlord class against the citizens of our nation, one that must be resisted. In other words, they used the founding documents of the nation to challenge the entire corrupt system. They were captured easily at Harper's Ferry and John Brown was later executed. But that simple action, that naïve declaration written down on paper, changed the discourse on slavery in America completely. No longer could the bogus progressive concept of slowly getting rid of slavery, state by state, convince Americans. And many, black and white, in the North and South, started to feel the system could no longer be tolerated.
When a tiny handful of men and women launched an uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in April of 1943, it was totally hopeless. They were killed in a few days. But the very fact that people were able to stand up and denounce, resist, fascistic governance in Eastern Europe, and the genocide policies that had become accepted practice, transformed the mood. Suddenly resistance movements started springing up again and the spirit of that uprising shook many who had been traumatized out of their sleep so that they no longer accept wall-to-wall fascism as a given.
It was not necessary for those leading the uprising to meet with those who would carry on the resistance in Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, and elsewhere.
When Jean Jaurès, head of the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO), was assassinated at a café in Paris on July 31, 1914, he was working around the clock with Hugo Haase of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Germany to organize, along with others in France, Germany, and elsewhere, strikes and other mass movements to stop the drive for war.
That specific effort was unsuccessful, and yet those who would continue the fight for peace in Europe in the years afterwards, all the way through 1945, were directly inspired by those efforts.
The current narcissistic culture that permeates our society makes such actions almost impossible and therefore we are rendered paralyzed. That cult of the self that makes self-sacrifice impossible, the consumption-focused materialism in which only the visible output counts, assures that those who have no money, who are not mentioned by Facebook, Twitter, or the New York Times, are discounted from the start.
But this assumption is not natural to humans, but was rather induced by corporations to make us think of everything around us, including other humans, as products to be consumed, and to make the organization of resistance nearly impossible because people are conditioned to think as consumers, not citizens, about success that can be measured.
The truth, however, is that the most fundamental powers of justice, honesty, compassion, and charity cannot be seen by the naked eye, and they contradict the basic imperatives of growth, consumption, and production that are assumed to define the economy.
We can win this brutal struggle against the billionaires who manipulate the people using supercomputer algorithms and a bankrupt consumption culture that cruelly reduces so many to virtual robots following their most base desires.
But we can only do so at the level of civilization, of self-awareness, and of moral commitment. If we try to play by their rules, by the assumption that the possession of things, or of narcissistic attention blasts, is our goal, then we are lost.
Let us not be caught up in some demand for greater numbers of activists.
As Henry the Fifth said, according to Shakespeare,
“If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires.”
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