In the absence of an authority that arises from the deep roots of being, those who hold power tend to abuse it…. In order to shift the unjust situation in the outer world [there must be ones] who will draw upon a greater source of authority than law or institutions or the market…who will “author”things…
–Michael Meade, Fate and Destiny: the Two Agreements of the Soul
By turning [Harriet] Tubman into a superhero “ with vague “woo-woo powers, we diminish her in memory and reduce our capacity to learn from her life. This…myth obfuscates…who she was on the inside…
–Tiya Miles, Night Flyer
[Tubman’s] choice to accept this altered state of consciousness [following her head injury] as religious experience…she was now distinctly equipped to tackle the questions that haunted her: Why did slavery exist? And (how) would her people be saved?
–Ibid.
It could be reasonably said of us (white middle-class liberals) that we are people who do not know we’re fated – that is, that we’re biological beings. We retain our innocent belief in free will against all odds; in fact, we need it for protection against the soul-betraying demands of life in capitalist technocracy. They say people who don’t know their history are bound to repeat it; most of us who do not know our own true captivity in fate will accept the “nicer”- if not easier – “fate” given in liberal reality; i.e., the realities of free-market capitalism including its relativization of the very idea that being human means anything beyond a stage toward perfected cyber being. Arguably, that innocence allows us to sustain our customary way of life under the awful awareness of the evils our government perpetrates in our name here and abroad, most recently adding 180 Iranian school girls murdered by U.S. bombs to the already haunted collective conscience.
As far as “fate” goes, we might be fascinated coming across the words “fate” and “destiny” in a fantasy novel or movie – perhaps intoned by a Merlin figure – because those words have resonance which the poetically-attuned ear in the soul hears and is attracted to. Trained as we are away from serious romanticism, we mostly do not pursue it as having meaning for me.
Not knowing fate in terms of its personal meaning – i.e., my fate – it is difficult for white liberals to fully appreciate peoples’ lives that have actually used fate to make of them something extraordinary in terms of the good they were able to realize; we tend either to raise them up to superhuman status, or prove them imposters. Idealistic actions obedient to inwardly accessed authority go against the grain of American materialist aspirations, and against the givens of class; they cannot be evaluated by science-based consciousness. What is behind the empirical curtain will never be captured on a cellphone or body camera. What’s more, we tend to wonder very little about extraordinary virtue in others, unless the results of the action taken are seemingly miraculous (i.e., leading enslaved people to freedom), in which case the doer is known as a “superwoman of the swamps,” or, in the other direction, insidious doubt is sown undermining the doer’s character.
Reading an article about the remarkably admirable life of the late Jesse Jackson (whose fate was to be son of impoverished cotton workers in the south) in CounterPunch, I recalled the relentless effort by the media in the 1980’s to reduce him to an “ego case.” And those seeds of doubt work. They grow. Like the accusations against MLK for his womanizing. Or Malcolm X for his hatred of white people, or Black Panthers for their insistence on protecting themselves, etc. So that the people who truly are working for social change are so easily translated via the media – which we’re dependent on to know anything of events outside our personal experience–into people suspected of harboring shady, malevolent tendencies toward the rest of us (white people). That is, secular white liberals, in our way, are as edgy about social revolution as the conservatives, and thus vulnerable to media manipulation. To “think outside the box” of whiteness takes strenuous effort that begins with an acquaintance with personal depth and consciousness of that thing called fate.
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Last night, lying awake, I pictured my everlasting personal struggle with self-confidence in a new way. I had been reading Tiya Miles’s biography of Harriet Tubman, which intentionally pulls Tubman down from the pedestal of supernaturally gifted to someone inwardly attuned to the moral voice in the soul (God). In so doing, she extends the light of Tubman’s example to those of us suffering not so directly from oppression, but from the dark night of capitalism’s evisceration of meaning, i.e., of the connectedness of all life. It came to me my social idealism is, similarly, a “night star” that leads me out from my personal suffering, suffering that is, in truth, a consequence of the oppression of the soul’s imagination in capitalist liberal reality. My idealism is being in my “right mind,” I am “okay as I am” – not, perhaps–a Jesse Jackson or a Medea Benjamin–but I can be certain that serenity of mind is the only acceptable foundation for virtuous action. The feeling of relief the “right mind” gives must be from God, I conclude; it cannot come to me without my experiencing personal inclusion in a larger reality. It obligates me to a larger good – God’s Good – that includes even white people like me with our weird kind of anti-suffering suffering – in its deliverance. Though attunement to the night star may be a bigger challenge for liberals raised without deep religious influence, it is still possible–but first must come the revelation of fate that opens upon religion’s mythic, imaginative depths.
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Sam, 78 years old, was a nearly daily customer at our coffeeshop over its 22 years. He’s a white (Italian-American) single, amiable guy who loves cars, motorcycles, books, music, and movies, is a reliable volunteer for arts programs, and, for several years, provided faithful assistance to a wheelchair-bound woman prominent in local art circles, until her death. He made something like 11 trips to New Orleans to help with post-Katrina clean-up, and is a particularly vocal anti-racist. In fact, he is excited about the topic almost as if he had discovered it. One could, understandably, hear him as one who “protesteth too much” except that he’s obviously sincere. A few years ago, he was made an honorary member of the local NAACP.
Last month, Sam was arrested on charges of having child pornography on his computer.
As I see his predicament, and I may be the only one who sees it this way, he is now a person who has run into his fate. I’d almost call it lucky, except that I know it does not/cannot feel that way to him and must sound hard-hearted coming from me.
This happens rarely to white liberals, that one learns that dark thing one never could look at fully consciously – uh-oh, I’m fated to (following Freud), “murder my father and sleep with my mother.” We carry that protective barrier around us that is a rationalist liberal reality. The dark secret, which is very connected with one’s fate and one’s destiny, is revealed at last. But will you accept this dark, unwanted part? Can you accept the dark part of your nature–in Sam’s case, his sexual interest in children, that will not be tolerated in society, in our lifetimes, if – and learn to live with it with dignity?
Here’s a question connected to the political: Is it possible for people who cannot achieve such humility individually to be trusted on the collective, national scale? What’s it worth if we ask indigenous Americans and descendants of enslaved people for forgiveness, if I cannot face and forgive that darkness in myself, but can only continue to be and do good so that I will be seen as good, and not as the bad I secretly believe myself to be? How, that is, do we find our secret goodness, our “right mind,” the strength and authority coming from those deep roots of being?
I believe Sam is not a special case, except in that he committed an actual crime which is how his dark secret is being outed. Of the two ways to find out why one feels misfitted, that is, to launch oneself on that inward quest, he’s been given the way via “catastrophe” (the other being art). The very fact that one does not want to go there into the personal darkness is the biggest giveaway. For no matter how many small clues one unconsciously drops that others might pick up on, as Sam did in abundance! (i.e., his compulsive loquaciousness, that easily got on friends’ nerves, no girlfriend or boyfriend but much mention of his – always age and hetero-appropriate – attractions, his strenuous and impressive do-gooding for others) people will not guess – they will not even be curious – as to what lies behind these behaviors that were – upon reflection – noticeably off.
Under the circumstances, social relatedness is in fact connected by mutual consent to capitalism; capitalism our real matrix, both social glue and that which provides us with our shaky sense of individuality in terms of being better than the other. Most of the time, despite Freud, we take the shallow basis as all there is. It gets us by in the liberal reality that rewards us with the privilege of whiteness, it readies us for AI’s total undermining of there being any worth (or reason!) in defending “ human being” as I do.
If there is to be repudiation of social connection via the medium of capitalism, if the local community is to be healthily inclusive, then, besides the obvious turning off the screens, it seems pretty obvious in-person living must have a different basis than the given. I’m arguing that such a basis is possible to find for people who will open the sealed package of their fate, entering their own wilderness. At the point one knows one’s fatedness, the harsh law of necessity, other knowledge becomes possible, not before.
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Over the course of the almost two full years since the sale and loss to us of our little urban coffeeshop, I’m beginning to see that the 22 years of “bliss,” the confidence its very existence gave to me, was, in terms of my own soul’s journey, Circe’s island. A lovely stopping place, enchanted for sure, but also an interruption in the journey home. Most crucially, I need to understand my default habit of self-condemnation (differentiated from the more useful self-doubt) that reappeared with the loss of our Cafe’s protective “umbrella” as what it is – evidence that I’m temporarily out of my right mind! I must now affirm over and over that my “right mind” is the only mind I’m called to be in. For better and worse, I’m not one of William James’s healthy-minded ones, who automatically turn their faces to the sunny side of the street. My vulnerability, the fate I was born into, once made conscious, the real trauma suffered in childhood doesn’t disappear, mine as real for me as Harriet Tubman’s trauma as an enslaved child was for her, as real as Jesse Jackson’s childhood of poverty and racism was for him.
The cause of my powerful tendency to self-condemnation (one of a host of self-disabling afflictions that plague people in that peculiar white liberal way of “not suffering,”) is traceable to the awful discardability of biological, fated humanity under capitalism. For, whether one knows it consciously or not, capitalism and all who profit from its necessary excess grant to one’s personal life as little worth as that of a Gazan child to the IDF. People’s Classroom history teacher Luigi is right– it’s not just “your bad day” (and one might add, it’s not because of illegal immigrants taking your jobs and soaking up welfare) – it’s capitalism; its devaluation of humanness makes me especially vulnerable to the endemic loneliness of our way of life.
Any truly unbearable system can be bearable for most people who suffer in it – even slavery. That is, its indignities and oppressions can be borne as just “the way it is” until something happens to break through. To discern systemic evil in one’s own case, based upon one’s own experience of traumatic injustice, is a powerful realization. And indeed, consciousness of capitalism as evil, for us who live within its placating context of material abundance and the uber lifeaccessed by social media’s algorithms, is elusive in a way that the enslaved person’s awareness of slavery as evil may not have been (though Tubman’s philosophical question why does slavery exist suggests its status as evil was not self-evident even to her). Luigi tells us he “converted” a fellow teacher at his high school, from being a MAGA guy to being on board with socialism (that is, he encouraged him to think!). But conversions can be shaky – this guy tells him he used to be much happier, now he’s depressed all the time!
The difference comes when one individually realizes the sense of purpose of, say, a Harriet Tubman, living in the context of a slave system, or a Jesse Jackson, that is, when one has met one’s genuine, serious-as-hell fate. The choice to understand the sense of purpose as God’s, rooted in myth and archetype, as “Night star” guidance, charges it differently; the real commonality for biological beings is suffering. One can then act, in the absence of social corroboration, on behalf of the common Good (which includes the good for earth and non-human life). How do I know I am called to creativity, and to think originally, just as Tubman knew she was meant to be free when no one, and no church at that time, could tell her that? In the subjectivity of the judgment is its power. Truth to tell, Sam is unlikely to give up trying to fight against knowing his fate, though it has hit him in the face. Even so, the personal question is the first that must be answered; socialist critique then will fit, resting for its truth on the authority of the imaginative, innately anarchist human soul, before even Marx.
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