Liberating Liberals: A Political Synthesis Of Nietzsche And Jesus; Vonnegut And Marx (Groucho, Not Karl); Gandhi And Machiavelli

Beauty

Chapter I

The Mental Prison Break

Compared to conservatives, liberals have almost an infinity of options from which to choose. Conservatives are mainly confined to the insights of a fundamentalist Christianity and capitalism, a highly-censored science, and whitewashed views of a rose-colored past.

As a result, many conservatives are actually prisoners of their own minds! Yet they have controlled America many times. They may even control when ostensibly, liberals are in power. How can this be?

Part of the problem is the staggering breadth of information from which liberals must choose. This includes the entire world’s current and past sciences, religions, and cultures — with all of it amplified by the infinity of our completely freethinking imaginations. This vast terrain often causes vast confusion.

Think of just some of the fundamentalisms liberals have recently questioned, many for the first time in history: to make war or construct love, individually consume or jointly commune, tolerate or alienate, eat meat or vege out, praise or blaspheme, share or buyer beware, marry or love free, abort or raise, work for the man or follow the bliss, and smoke-toke-drop-pop or what not — or not.

Liberals can be loosely defined as everyone left of Republicans including: Blue and Yellow Dog and left-leaning Democrats, Progressives, Socialists, Anarchists, and even the foreign policies of Libertarians. They all believe to some degree in one of the basics of liberal freethinking which was discovered way back when by Socrates. Roughly translated it reads: At least we know that we don’t know.¹ Whereas most conservatives believe that they have the absolutely right answers.

Yet, because liberals know that we don’t know, we also have to seriously consider that conservatives may have the right answers. And do this knowing that conservatives won’t return the favor. And I say that to any conservatives who might be reading this — you may be right. C’est la freethinking vie!

Still, liberals are the primary processors of progress. Or, as novelist Saul Bellow notes, we are the vanguard of: One more inertia broken up and the pieces tossed into the cauldron of modern consciousness.² Liberals break up the inertias and try to figure out their fallout. Musician James Taylor put it another way: Sail on home to Jesus won’t you good girls and boys. I’m all in pieces you can have your own choice. But I can see a heavenly band full of angels and they’re coming to set me free….³

Liberals aren’t in pieces just because of religion, but also because of our profound freedom in all areas. Our minds are sometimes a cauldron of disillusionments or excitements over what we thought just yesterday were time-tested truths. The fallout makes it much harder to form a coherent political party. And though many of us are Christian, we aren’t at all sure whether a band full of angels will be coming to help sort it all out.

Regardless, it should be a cause of great pride that liberals have ventured far beyond the mind prisons of fundamentalist Christianity, fundamentalist capitalism, and Leave It to Beaver lifestyles. Not that Ward and June Cleaver didn’t make a fine life for the boys.

VP sport mom phenoms

Begun mainly in the experiments of the 1960’s, liberal thought adventures have far surpassed the breadth of Western Civilization’s four other great mental prison breaks: ancient Greece, the Judeo-Christian ethical revolution, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. In addition, three of these brain gains reached only a few thousand intellectuals. Thanks to modern media, the brain break of the `60’s reached billions. For instance, explanations of the fall of the Soviet Empire include the Cold War wars, the Russian war in Afghanistan, Solzhenitsyn’s books, or Ronald Reagan’s words: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. But others suggest that the cause was The Beatle’s White Album, featuring the hit single, Back in the USSR. The album was of course only the symbol representing millions of other of our freethinking, cultural exports.

In addition, liberals are not only liberating ourselves, but are dragging along, kicking and scheming, conservatives. Colin Powell was Bush II’s first Secretary of State thanks in great part to liberal ideals on race. Sarah Palin was transformed from hockey Mom to VP phenom mainly because of liberal’s liberating women. Liberals perform the experiments. Conservatives jump on board after the good results become so obvious that it’s impossible not to.

Yet, the inherently sloppy thinking of most conservatives is camouflaged by the fact that they own most of the money, resources and media, and have built awe-inspiring institutions — with diabolical weaponry to back them up. These intimidating realities sometimes railroad liberals into severely inhibited thinking, and shackle our imaginations about what life could be.

One example of this was a War Resisters League (WRL) meeting I attended in New York nine months before the World Trade Center horror. The WRL office was a dilapidated, 1,500 square-foot building perched precariously on a small island between two huge thoroughfares, near ethereal Greenwich Village. Then I subway-ed to south Manhattan’s financial district — an economic capital of planet earth. It contains hundreds-of-millions of square feet of fifty-story, glistening marble palaces anchored to dozens of top-dollar city blocks. I knew that these beautiful monstrosities camouflaged major contributors to oil wars, ecological devastation and labor abuse. How much human and ecological bone meal is symbolically buried in each pristine marble block?

On the other hand, people in these same skyscrapers helped create a living standard that has elevated human happiness to unimagined heights for many. They bankrolled productive efficiencies that made the First World a cornucopia of ever changing, miraculous consumption. Now even much of the Third World is reaping its many blessings and curses.

How could I argue with these immensities when arriving from the ever so humble, WRL dwelling? Then I remembered the even more humble Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) office in Atlanta which generated much of the immense Civil Rights power needed to desegregate America. Wall Street’s gleaming towers began to look a little bit more like Hollywood facades, concealing dubious foundations.

(But yes, I was still intimidated enough to elevate to the top of one of the Twin Towers, avoiding an ironic and awful, 9/11 death by just 274 days and 10 hours.)

The point is that, just because a momentum has majestic power, doesn’t mean it makes sense. Liberals have internalized conservative arguments ad nauseam, but we shouldn’t let their awesome expressions curtail our goals.

Because of the great audacity involved in liberal liberation, we should also show extreme compassion for ourselves. Tolerance of our own learning curves will help us sail the uncharted seas of freethinking. On the voyage the massive whirlpools of fundamentalisms will be our greatest enemy, sucking us into the tempting comfort.

Bleeding hearts coagulate!

One of liberalism’s most effective analytical tools is compassion. Taunted as the bleeding heart syndrome by conservatives, practical compassion helps us find reasons why people hurt the community rather than settling for conservative knee-jerk condemnation. One of the main sources of liberal compassion is Jesus. He said:

Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy…. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God…. But whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also…. Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you…. Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.⁴

These passages make me, and I think most liberals, weak in the knees. Life has at least that meaning: helping other people, relieving suffering, trying to avoid war. As even atheistic satirist Kurt Vonnegut sees it, we’re here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.⁵ The early twentieth century labor leader Eugene Debs described an even more specific compassion. He wrote:

As long as there’s a lower class I’m in it. As long as there’s a criminal element I’m of it. As long as there’s a soul in prison, I am not free.⁶

In addition, Jesus frees us by declaring: Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.⁷ That statement is one of the tools that liberals can use to escape guilt. Thank you Jesus!

Not good enough. It’ll be very hard to forgive ourselves if humanity destroys civilization by nukes, poisonous waste, or excessive consumption. And with Freud, Rachel Carson, Einstein, etc., we’re beginning to know what we do. We need new guilt medicines to lessen such horrific feelings.

And worse, conservatives often don’t feel this guilt. Their religious fundamentalists count on God to save the day. If God doesn’t, time to rapture up, out of sight and mind. It is a 1st century religion.

Meanwhile, conservative economic fundamentalists count on the invisible hand of the market to solve all problems. This appendage is some kind of economic god masquerading as science. The good get rich and the bad get poor. Of course there are hundreds of highly complex economic equations proving that supply side spending’s elasticity multiplier effect will maximize the production and depreciation of short-selling derivatives. It’s not the first time trillions of hours of human labor were spent rationalizing what is in great part superstition.

If fundamentalist economics doesn’t work, conservatives envision road-warrior Mel Gibson fighting for post-apocalyptic barrels of oil at 80 mph as about the best we can expect. Or its contemporary counterpart: hole up behind a gated community, build your own empire, and help others when you feel like it. It’s an 18th century economic theory developed long before most of the modern economic realities had begun.

In addition, as even the most consummate of capitalists, Ayn Rand, noted: Christianity is the best kindergarten of communism possible, — because it so emphasizes self-sacrifice and sharing.⁸ Thus not only are we dealing with fundamentalists in conservatives, but with a dogma whose two major fundamentalisms almost completely contradict each other.

Freethinking liberals are centuries ahead of conservatives in the maturity of our thought processes. The situation is like that of a willful, conservative child in a sandbox who has most of the toys, and who is trashing the sand box with pollution, development and violence. He also has an Armageddon button he’s constantly threatening to use.

We freethinking liberals are the mature child in the other corner of the sand box, alarmingly sizing up the immature child. We’re not trying to take the toys, but only to gently ease the dangerous ones from his hands. Meanwhile the conservative child is using brilliant intelligence, made unassailable by fundamentalist limitations, to convince us that he is right and we are the irrational, lunatic fringe. We are not.

Nietzscheans for Jesus

At the opposite pole from conservative fundamentalisms is the freewheeling freethinking of the 19th century German philosopher, Nietzsche. He described the excitement inherent in a wide-open mind, as interpreted by the Nietzsche scholar, Leslie Paul Thiele:

Stripped of purpose, life becomes a terrifying, essentially tragic experience. But it also regains lost innocence. Guilt is impossible without duties to shirk or natural callings to neglect…. Man is free to create himself, for he bears no transcendent nature, nor is he subject to pre-established goals…. Only the innocence of becoming gives us the greatest courage and the greatest freedom. With no obligations to fulfill, life becomes an exercise in creative freedom, an experiment, not a contract.⁹

In one mighty declaration Nietzsche claims a liberation from all guilt, a proclamation of inescapable innocence, and an invitation to living it up, down and sideways — all while reserving the right to cordial relations with the straight and narrow. Complete freedom from guilt, and for innocence, means we’re also innocent even if we nuke or pollute the world. According to Thiele, one of Nietzsche’s goals was to eliminate the guilt …that darken our minds and cast upon the world of appearance the gloom of lost innocence.¹⁰ And he contends that such innocent freedom automatically confers upon its acolyte the courage to pursue it.

This may not seem like news to us liberated liberals. Breaking through unnecessary guilt is merely what we did in the 1960’s. However, now we’ve attained enough maturity to explore these experiments more responsibly. Alternatively, Vonnegut describes life that fulfills a boiler-plate contract — one to which even we liberals are prone to backslide:

To the yet unborn, to all innocent whisps of undifferentiated nothingness. Watch out for life. I have caught life. I was a whisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened up quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my surroundings. Nothing they said could be appealed. They said I was a boy named Rudolph Waltz, and that was that. They said the year was 1932, and that was that. They never shut up. Year after year they piled detail upon detail. They do it still. You know what they say now? They say the year is 1982, and I am 50 years old. Blah, blah, blah.¹¹

To approach real liberation we liberals need to question even the most elementary definitions of ourselves. If this happened nationally, America could become a true democracy governed by authentic freethinkers. Imagine 325 million healthy, secure and relatively happy people trying to figure out the best direction for society. Everyone could discuss issues with wide-open minds, yet agree to abide by the majority — while retaining great respect for minority viewpoints. Then imagine us coordinating it all for the greatest health of the community, and for the greatest individuation of the individual.

This collaboration would create a massive mass of advanced intelligence, a brain-computer network with 325 million intimate, but totally independent thinkers. Or, if world-wide, six billion of the same. There’s a painfully slim chance this could happen. Yet, among freethinking liberals, I think this could start to happen today.

Dutiful duty avoidance

According to Nietzsche we don’t have to accept any duties. But if we do accept the challenge of saving civilization, one of our most important jobs would be to figure out how to be happier. Not only is it a most potentially gratifying job, but speaking from a center of happiness may be the best way to communicate effectively with conservatives — as well as that part of our liberal minds still imprisoned by conservative fundamentalisms. Not to mention that nothing will close conservative ears faster than delivering our message with shrill bitterness, rather than happy passion.

It isn’t going to be easy liberating these mind prisons, but the more we liberate ourselves from our lesser, but still oppressive jails, the happier and more effective we may be. And the more playful we are, the more quickly we’ll uncover our own fundamentalisms.

Wrote Nietzsche:

No, life has not disappointed me. On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year — ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge — and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery….Life as a means to knowledge — with this principle in one’s heart one can live not only boldly but even gaily, and laugh gaily, too.¹²

We freethinking liberals experiment daily, often to defend our planet’s people and ecology. At times we need to rest from this Herculean task by what Nietzsche described as looking down upon ourselves with artistic distance, and laughing at ourselves.¹³

Life and even human consciousness can be seen as an experiment. Baby boomers were experimenters par excellence in the 1960s. Let’s continue to experiment until we die — for ourselves and our society. We may have just begun to scratch the surface of what could be.

God’s shifting shadow

One of the popular misconceptions about Nietzsche was that he was an adamant atheist. According to Thiele, he only opposed the existence of a god who would dictate how man is to live, thus stymieing human creativity.¹⁴

Nietzsche was much more concerned with the