By Mitch Van Acker
The third chapter of our 5 part series: Zenpolitik, in which Van Acker explores taoist practices and political pandemonium. Regardless of where one sit on the political spectrum, this read aims to push readers off their laurels by taking a grim look at contemporary America.
“Your mind is like this water my friend. When it is agitated it becomes difficult to see. But if you allow it to settle, the answer becomes clear.”
—Master Oogway
It's easy to see why outrage has become the standard mode for political discourse in the modern era. Our communication tools are scripted to provoke outrage or, at the very least, a low-burning irritation to keep us engaged and arrested in that which makes us more sick and more delusional. Anger is the last-ditch emotion the ego employs when it feels that it’s up against a wall. More and more people today feel frozen out of the prosperity of our core institutions. And even those best situated inside those institutions find that they have to spin themselves deeper and deeper into webs of paralyzing bureaucracy and miopic social narratives in order to maintain whatever sort of power these institutions claim to dole out freely to any hardworking freethinking go-getter. The result is a society of haves and have-nots in which the have-nots are banging on the door to get in and the haves—whether they know it or not—are banging on the door to get out.
We all feel trapped or wounded in some deep way. Having this wound is a condition of being human. It’s as if every person carries with them a burning ball of lead that hangs somewhere behind their ribs. It's a core existential irk that the ego hides in. It heats up and expands whenever we realize that death, the limits of our perception, and the limits of our understanding will always withhold the world from our grasp as it slips away from us and we slip away from it.
I believe that people get angry in political contexts in large part as a way of accommodating for this burning ball of lead. In a society where the eminence of religion has all but collapsed and the economy survives off of co-opting the identities of its consumers and then selling it back to them in the form of mass-produced junk, politics, of all things, has emerged as a sensible route for endowing life with meaning. Two people of opposing viewpoints that are mesmerized by politics in this way can rail for hours about their differences in health care reform—or any issue for the matter— because they’ve abandoned the hope of ever constructing a reasoned solution. They perceive an attack on their viewpoint as an attack on the very value structure that keeps them from tumbling headlong into the abyss.
Zen doesn’t teach us to eliminate all anger and it doesn’t make the claim that anger is bad. According to Alan Watts, many of the holiest of Zen masters not only indulged in petty vices like smoking and causal sex, but also were known to have great tempers. What distinguishes a Zen master’s anger from a friend’s unsavory facebook post is that, odd as this sounds, the Zen master arrives at his anger through discipline. His anger comes from a place of transparency with his true nature, a nature that anger is invariably a part of. It may be a subtle difference, but it's an important one. A Zen master doesn’t cling to his passions to stabilize his own ego and he doesn’t nerocticlly reopen old scares or entertain grudges. It’s the difference between allowing that ball of lead to burn so hot that it disfigures the whole body as opposed to channeling its heat in an integrated, productive way: to stay warm on a winter’s night, for example, or light a cigarette after sex.
This sort of spontaneous, transparent anger, the necessary salt in the soup of a balanced consciousness, is a far cry from the kind of outrage increasingly characteristic of our political discourse. The anger we see now is a habitual, narrative-based anger that we use as a means of self-definition rather than change. We increasingly define ourselves and others by what makes us angry and use incendiary language to distinguish enemies and reiterate the values of our chosen team. Yet if the values of our teams or our self-identification with them require anger to sustain its coherence, then we can be sure that we’ve got a deeper and more complex problem with how we ground ourselves in the political landscape.
Neurologically speaking, anger reduces the span of your consciousness for the purposes of survival. It zeros in on a discrete set of immediate solutions and drives us to pursue them with the utmost intensity. This is not altogether a bad thing. Anger focuses your attention—an advantage that can serve us well in our attention-impoverished age. But this brand of focus has a cost. Anger narrows not only your perceptual bandwidth, but also your perception of time. It follows then that anger makes us impatient and unable to see other options. As a matter of calibrating our perception, anger seduces us to actions, often violent actions, that are geared more towards satisfying a sense of immediate moral gratification as opposed to building a sustainable path to improvement.
I’m not making the claim that anger can’t have an essential use in fighting worthy political battles. Quite the contrary. Anger can be extremely useful if and only if it can be refined from its component mental states of fear and confusion. The more we habituate ourselves to anger and it’s short-term time scales, the harder it is to separate it from fear and confusion. We shouldn’t be so quick to demand that people “get angry” or suggest that people “should be outraged” about a certain issue no matter how justified they would be in their anger. This is not a moralistic point, it is again a practical one. If you try to mobilize a group of well-intentioned but extremely angry people you will find that your cause will only fracture into infighting and holier-than-thou pissing contests. The only one who benefits from this is your opponent who is likely entrenched in solid institutional foundations. It doesn’t matter that they are uninspired; that is a benefit to them. Institutions have the advantage of banality and this can only be overcome by an impassioned but clear-headed approach.
We’ve generated most of our political maina by attempting to micro-manage the thoughts and actions of people on the other side of a partisan conflict that, statistically speaking, is irrelevant. Martin Gilens and Ben Page of the University of Princeton, showed in one of the largest empirical studies of American policy of the past forty years that while the political views of the economic elite and special interest groups were positively correlated with the actions of the American government, the views of the average American voter were statistically insignificant (1). Pair this with the fact that annually only a mere 0.02% of the American population gives relevant donations to political campaigns and only four-hundred families gave half of all the money spent on campaign contributions and Super PACs in the 2015 election cycle (2). Antitrust authorities have been asleep at the wheel while big tech companies swallow-up competitors—since 2004 Facebook has spent 22 billion in acquisitions (3)—and seemingly coordinate to undermine political outsiders on both sides. Consider House Representative and Democratic candidate Tusli Gabbard’s lawsuit against Google last summer for suspending her campaign’s advertising account for hours after her break-out performance in the first Decomcratic debate. The judge dismissed the case because Google was not a government body and therefore unbound by the first amendment (4). Consider also the recent coordinated shut-down of the Conservative social media platform Parler by Apple, Google, and Amazon (5). While we have yet to see how the Parler proceedings will play out, I expect that like Gabbard’s lawsuit, these companies will be excused on the grounds that they are private companies beyond the reach of constitutional ethics.
As daunting as these problems sound, much of these issues could be remedied with efforts from anti-corruption initiatives like Rootstrikers (6). Indeed if we spent a small fraction of our current rancor on solving these practical problems as opposed to ideological fatalisms, the utter emptiness of party conflict would be made obvious—more obvious than it already is. Neither Joe Biden or Donald Trump were viable options for any responsible voter. We cannot survive on a lesser-of-two-evils logic in which we are coerced into perpetuating our broken democracy because of the supposed existential threat that each candidate signifies to the other party. We have a system that neither works for Democrats or Republicans, a system that is non-ideological, a system responsive only to money and bureaucratic precedents and hurried congressmen bending the knee to the most powerful constellation of private companies in human history. All we seem to be able to do in response is, to use Bret Wienstien’s apt remark, “LARP our way to armageddon,” perpetuating conflict for conflict’s sake.
Comments