By Mitch Van Acker
The final 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.
“In giving away the control you’ve got it.”
—Alan Watts
Democracy is based upon the principle of delegating authority to the remotest unit of control possible. As opposed to tolerating single points of failure in the miscalculations and prejudices of a few despots, democracy acts as a kind of crowd-sourced artificial intelligence system. The American character was defined by the rejection of the idea that the destinies of the many should be governed by the petty squabbles of a few aloof “divinely ordained” rulers that had a bad habit of sending thousands to die over plots of land that could hardly accommodate the size of the armies that would fight over them. People take democracy as a given only because the narrow consensus builders of our time put forward a toothless version of democracy that only seeks to further the steady seizing of power by states and special interests. It’s easy to say that you believe in democracy, it's much harder to affirm giving up control as a political principle and to acknowledge that these things are one in the same. Our technologically-advanced society has rolled out subtler ways of controlling that all of us in our anger and confusion have relied upon to stabilize untenable expectations about our reality and ourselves.
All of the positions I’ve explored above are in their own ways expressions of giving up control and allowing the inherent intelligence that the egoless aspect of our being is privy to. Another quote from Lao Tzu:
“The great Tao flows everywhere
both to the left and to the right.
It loves and nourishes all things
but does not lord it over them
and when merits are accomplished
it lays no claim to them.”
Embracing ambiguity is a means of giving up the false promise of control offered by certainty: the idea that if you can predict the future or know the past perfectly then you have mastered it. Unbalanced habitual anger is a fear response to the ego’s thwarted attempts to seize control over others and over nature. And even applied meditation, as paradoxical as it sounds, is a form of renouncing the tyranny of the consciousness mind for the thoughtless, but highly disciplined practice of the basic components of everyday life and, in extension, the most components of practicing government.
If I could boil down what a Zenpolitik looks like to the most concrete example, an example more minimal than a specific policy or government action, I’d liken it to learning to dance. Anyone who’s had dance lessons—or lessons in any other activity for that matter—will know that there is a stark difference between holding the instructions given by your teacher in your head and actually incarnating the steps in rhythm and form. It may be a symptom of our information age that our main issue with progressing is our inability to get out of our heads and into the real world. Indeed we’ve come to identify with our inner monologue and its cicumablualtions through algorithms and ad campaigns, so much that it appears to be the most real thing that exists; and being the most real thing to exists to us we assume incorrectly that it’d be better for every other inner monologue to exist in the exact same way. To recover from the lie is to let go.