Another superb and timely short video from Academy of Ideas. The reference to Václav Havel’s ideas about building “parallel structures” takes me back to Bill Whittle’s 2012 “Where do we go now?” talk, and I wonder whether Bill was aware of an influenced by Havel’s writing on this subject.
One of many profound passages: (See here for the full transcript. It’s well worthwhile.)
Compliance is the food that feeds totalitarians. Compliance is not, and never will be, the path back to some form of normality. Rather non-compliance and civil disobedience are essential to counter the rise of totalitarian rule. But in addition to resistance, a forward escape into a reality absent the sickness of totalitarian rule requires the construction of a parallel society. A parallel society serves two main purposes: it offers pockets of freedom to those rejected by the totalitarian system, or who refuse to participate in it, and it forms the foundation for a new society that can grow out of the ashes of the destruction wrought by the totalitarians. Or as Václav Havel, a dissident under the communist rule of Czechoslovakia, explains in his book The Power of the Powerless:
“When those who have decided to live within the truth have been denied any direct influence on the existing social structures, not to mention the opportunity to participate in them, and when these people begin to create what I have called the independent life of society, this independent life begins, of itself, to become structured in a certain way.
“…[these] parallel structures do not grow . . .out of a theoretical vision of systemic change (there are no political sects involved), but from the aims of life and the authentic needs of real people.” (Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless)
There are innumerable ways to contribute to the construction of a parallel society. One can build technologies that promote freedom or agoristic economic institutions that further voluntary exchange. One can run a business that resists implementing unjust laws or mandates, or one can create media or educational institutions that counter the lies and propaganda of the state. Or one can create music, literature or artwork that counters the staleness of totalitarian culture. The parallel society is a decentralized and voluntary alternative to the centralized and coercive control of the totalitarian society and as Havel explains:
“One of the most important tasks the ‘dissident movements’ have set themselves is to support and develop [parallel social structures]. . . What else are those initial attempts at social self organization than the efforts of a certain part of society to . . . rid itself of the self-sustaining aspects of totalitarianism and, thus, to extricate itself radically from its involvement in the [totalitarian] system?” (Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless)
I haven’t been writing as much here as in past times, in part due to finding Twitter, GETTR, Parler, and Gab to be convenient outlets for concise, off-the-cuff thoughts. With the world gone as mad as it now has, I feel I have a great deal of catching up to do in this more enduring journal of observations, and much of it merits the deeper and more systematic exploration that writing longer pieces here facilitates. The task feels daunting at its outset, but I feel the need to tackle it with some persistent commitment, as there is so much gone awry in need of urgent remedy.
I haven’t yet written here, more than indirectly, about the now approximately two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, and our variously advisable and insane responses to it. There is much that needs to be captured for posterity, about the madness that we have allowed to descend on us and dominate our lives, and the darker-than-expected things I’ve learned about human nature in the process.
Simultaneous with the massive social experiment of addressing a global pandemic with radical measures decoupled from rational, salutary feedback loops, we in the USA were subjected to the determined resurgence of an unhinged social critic culture with which I have had all too much bitter experience. I can imagine that to well-intentioned younger generations this might have appeared to be something genuinely new and worthy of possible deference, but to me it is an old, familiar, and despicable foe in a very thinly veiled disguise. I have written here, since the beginning, of my heartfelt love for the American Idea and way of life. I have wanted for my life to stand as a celebration of this culture of ours and its possibilities — to express herein my feeling of gratitude for them, and to help others to see the beauty that I do and learn the means of thriving in it that I have acquired through a lifetime of observing, admiring, and learning from the achievements of others. I have wasted far too many moments of this precious journey in the company of smug, snide, bitter social critics — from academia in the late 90s and early ’00s, to the radical activist sub-culture of the art world, to eight years living in various parts of the the San Francisco Bay Area. I have watched so many of the things I love and value maligned, slandered, and disparaged by people whose fear, envy, narcissism, or other such mania have driven them to enthusiastically tear down and destroy rather than create. I have been, since my college years in the mid-90s, a witness to expressions of worldview and intent that I now regret having dismissed too lightly as fringe academic radicalism, which turned out to be the seeds of toxic ideology that means to “subvert” and dismantle everything I love, and which has seen its way, through persistent incrementalism, to the dubious and contrived claim of mainstream respectability it makes today. I assure you this is nothing new, but rather the down-the-road manifestation of decades of intellectual termites gnawing away at our cultural foundations — a phenomenon that I have witnessed. Yesterday’s uncontested absurdities have become today’s promoted ideology, leaving us in sad but not unrecoverable shape.
What we’ve come to now, as the culmination of decades of infiltration and radicalization of our education institutions (all the way from universities to K-12) is a broader cultural realization of how very far off course we’ve allowed ourselves to be blindly led. Those who mean to dismantle what they despise in this Liberty-loving culture have been acting with newly emboldened fervor, while simultaneously being umasked by parental oversight that they did not appear to anticipate. As a parent of two young boys who I love dearly, and whose futures must be as free, open, and optimistic as possible, it’s vitally important to me to support and be part of these parents’ and students’ rights movements. What the courage of past generations has purchased for our benefit at such high cost cannot be left casually on the table, sacrificed for no purpose and to no good end. It is worth the proverbial fight.
Watch for what I hope will be more frequent posts here in support of setting things right. I’ll endeavor to shed light on what I’ve seen, promote others’ good work, find and promote solutions, and maybe even lift my own spirits and yours a bit in the process.
I heard this song for the first time recently. It struck me as uncannily pertinent to the time of fear-driven manipulation that we seem to be living through.
Fear is a powerful weapon indeed, and it appears to be both far easier to scare people en masse than I had ever previously imagined, and harder to wake them out of a cloud of deeply reinforced fear once it is in place.
“We’ve got nothing to fear — but fear itself?
Not pain or failure, not fatal tragedy?
Not the faulty units in this mad machinery?
Not the broken contacts in emotional chemistry?
With an iron fist in a velvet glove
We are sheltered under the gun
In the glory game on the power train
Thy kingdom’s will be done
And the things that we fear
Are a weapon to be held against us…
He’s not afraid of your judgement
He knows of horrors worse than your Hell
He’s a little bit afraid of dying —
But he’s a lot more afraid of your lying
And the things that he fears
Are a weapon to be held against him…
Can any part of life — be larger than life?
Even love must be limited by time
And those who push us down that they might climb —
Is any killer worth more than his crime?
Like a steely blade in a silken sheath
We don’t see what they’re made of
They shout about love, but when push comes to shove
They live for the things they’re afraid of
And the knowledge that they fear
Is a weapon to be used against them…”
— Rush, “The Weapon (Part II of Fear)”
I’m a “rah, rah America” guy. I can’t help it. Ever since I can remember, I’ve felt an appreciation and natural affection for this way of life of ours here in the USA, with its steadfast foundational devotion to Liberty. What I would call a deeper gratitude likely came later, as I’m sure I took this precious inheritance for granted growing up, and had little idea it would ever truly be in jeopardy. The ever-present threat of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union loomed large during the 70s and 80s, but I found reassurance in the cultural resolve I perceived all around me. We seemed sure of who we were and of the imperative to stand and defend this way of life. It was precious and worth every measure of devotion, so much so that even a fearsome and dangerous external enemy did not in the end seem more than a serious but likely manageable concern that we’d do everything we could to guard against. I had no idea, back then, that our foundations were under sustained internal attack, or that our undoing could ever possibly come from within rather than from an external adversary. The possibility just wasn’t even on my radar.
Growing up in this environment, I never anticipated, much less understood, the desire of some to live in a collectivist society, even as some abstract ideal. It seemed obvious to me where that road led — that it was a sure-fire recipe for subservience to an abusive, totalitarian state, and that there was no more certain way to extinguish creativity and the potential for thriving that make life worth living. Striving for independence and the life of a free individual was clearly worth it, even with the attendant uncertainty and risk. The only way I ever imagined that people would submit to collectivism was unwillingly, under the thumb of a totalitarian reign of terror like that which prevailed in the Soviet Union and its captive satellite nations, in China, or in North Korea. It interested me to learn the stories of people who had escaped collectivist societies, and also how those who chose to remain or were unable to escape found ways to cope, endure, maintain perspective, and push in whatever ways they could to move things back in the direction of freedom. Traveling to the Czechoslovakia of 1986 (where we had family who feared the peril they’d face when the state learned they’d met with Americans, including a cousin we never got to see who we later learned was sent to a forced-labor camp), and awareness of Soviet dissidents such as Sakharov, Sharansky, and Solzhenitsyn, reinforced my interest in understanding the way out from such things. Encountering Americans who expressed an affinity for or aversion to criticizing collectivism, later in life, was an experience for which I was wholly unprepared, and stands to this day as about the most chilling realization of my life. If, after every purge and totalitarian horror of the 20th century, there are people who still yearn to bring about a move to collectivism in some form, and if those people can gain the levers of power and cultural influence in so steadfastly, defiantly free and independent a place as the United States, then there seems to be no limiting factor on the horror that may await us in the future yet to come.
These worries bring me gloom sometimes, and the eager, enthusiastic embrace of appeals to authority we’ve seen in the COVID years has only deepened my concern. But I can’t allow myself to live in that gloom. Such is not the purpose of life in this world — one imperiled by our self-destructive will to subservience, to be sure, but also too full of hope for many to grasp. I can’t make choices for others, nor would I wish to, but I can choose my own actions and attitude, and the thoughts I populate my world with. Even as the slow creep of incrementalism seems to march inexorably on, I see glimmers of an inextinguishable desire to live free and thrive, and tremendous hope in the prospect of opening new frontiers and decentralizing ourselves away from the ossified institutions that are holding us back from the fullness of what we can achieve. I’m going into the future with this thought and the goal of realizing it in mind. I have faith, in the end, that we will find our way.
Freedom is a tremendous and precious inheritance. To develop our potential, thrive in it, and pass it along to each successive generation is our highest calling. I write here to give my thanks, and to seek ways we can cultivate the resilience, independence, courage, and indomitable spirit necessary to sustain a culture that cherishes liberty.
