Today, you and I are going to begin considering two responses to societal reality from within the Empire.
In the abstract we can call them the Political and the Spiritual. In the concrete terms of emotion, considering our modern situation politically leads to a response of Anger, while considering it spiritually evokes a first reaction of Fear–fear which becomes Loathing the closer it gets to political rage.
Both responses, or any response on the spectrum between them, are valid. Anyone who has chosen to consider the situation with an open mind, or been compelled to live through it, can easily understand why it leads to fury on the one hand, fear on the other, or more typically a wobbling oscillation between the two.
The response of anger is justified, and the response of fear is understandable, because the situation we find ourselves in as average people within a modern society is horrifying to both our human and animal sensibilities.
The societal reality you and I live through day to day can seem normal, but that is only because it has been normalized, often deliberately and strategically, by those who have a vested interest in making the horror seem ordinary and the evil seem banal.
Let’s start with the brilliant analysis of Malcolm X. On the plantation, he says, everyone fell into one of three categories. You had masters, and house negroes, and field negroes.
The brilliance of the analysis comes from Malcolm’s observation that nothing has changed.
When I was still a child, more than a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, I was told that I had three choices. I could lead. I could follow. Or I could “get the hell out of the way”, which has always been the option that had the most immediate appeal, for me, in spite of the fact that I’m still not sure what it means.
To lead means striving to become a master. To follow means rather obviously to obey, and to orient your life toward becoming a house negro.
That leaves ‘getting out of the way’ matched up with ‘field negro’, and although I’m not sure the match is philosophically perfect (in part because no one knows what getting out of the way means), I think we can take that much on faith for now. Malcolm was a separatist, for example. He admired his brothers who found the courage to secede from the plantation by running away, and he believed that physically separating from the Empire was the best answer to what was at the time called “the race question”, or sometimes “the black problem”.
In any case, having your choice limited to these three options is not “freedom” in any real sense. It’s easy and technically true to say that whites in America have always had more ‘freedom’ than non-whites (whatever those dumb terms evolve to mean), and that a literal field negro had less ‘freedom’ than a black person born into shiny modern American modernity. But most of the time and for most people, hot takes like these end up being distinctions without any difference.
The poet Charles Bukowski, echoing Malcolm on the subject of nothing changing, says:
“Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.”
Another reason that the offered choice is false is that many, many forms of “getting the hell out of the way” have been criminalized over time, depending on local circumstance. A field negro who ran away became a criminal by doing so, by stealing back his own freedom and labor from the master who claimed to own them.
Today, there is no frontier outlet for getting out of the way. Wherever you may go the hell away to, the very land you stand on is already owned by some damn master or another. Putting up a shanty and planting carrots anywhere is just going to get you arrested, unless you first have to money to ‘own’ the land yourself. And even if you do make it somehow to the owning class, you will run up against the zoning board, who will want you to get, at the very least, a permit to install a mandatory septic tank, and who will be glad to forcibly inform you that your kind of shanty isn’t permitted in the Residential B-1 zone that they themselves placed your ‘owned’ property into.
And by the way, your taxes are overdue, or … your property is being seized by eminent domain, or … we’ve invented this thing called ‘civil asset forfeiture’, so fork it over, or … we don’t like the way you’re raising your children, up there on Ruby Ridge, so we’re coming up there to shoot them, or you, or whoever gets in the way.
So our only realistic choices are to try claw up the ladder and become beastly Masters ourselves, or to obey and devote ourselves to one, enslaving ourselves voluntarily. (Bukowski again: “And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does. As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it“.)
Being offered the vague third choice of getting the hell out of the way really just means ‘you are free to get the fuck out of my sight, peasant, and stay out no matter where I choose to look’.
And even so–I speak for myself–the impossible choice is nevertheless the only morally acceptable choice.
I don’t have much to say to the masters of capital, because there’s nothing to say–there’s only wordless contempt rising up like bile in my throat, manifesting itself in a mostly useless political rage, and a mostly worthless spiritual fear.
Likewise, I have few words for the obedient followers, the house negroes. For the best of them (thinking of Dilsey in The Sound and The Fury, thinking of a middle manager who held my hand when our masters were trying to stab me) I have pity that arises from a shared and spiritual fear. For the worst I have a loose scorn. But words stick in my throat either way, not wanting to waste themselves on what can’t be changed.
But for the rest of you
oh I have words,
all my words,
and more.
To be continued.