Here’s a thought: maybe there’s no peace in this miserable world because we’re all trying to control our impulses all the time.

I have a simple rule I follow, I do exactly as I please. Interestingly, however, this policy isn’t easy to live by, because first of all, you can no longer bitch whine and complain about other sh*ts making your life miserable, and second, you have to follow that deceptively facile impulse all the way. It is because of these inherent difficulties that very few people do as they please, and why generally, people find it easier to follow other people’s orders and complain about them.

The first thing that happens when you do as you please is you necessarily become unemployed. To be employable is to agree to do what you don’t want to. Now many of you might say that’s easy for me to say, I don’t have children, maybe I know people who help me with money, bla bla bla. Sure, but that doesn’t change how hard it is. I have chosen the life I live, I live only and entirely because I wish to do as I please. I have no children, I own very little, I hardly ever go out, I live like a snail whose slime is running out, I have a stack of debts piling up that would scare any living mortal that didn’t have the insane conviction about all of this that I do.

It isn’t easy. It is isolating, dull and often nerve-wrackingly monotonous. I have now for a long time gone without new clothes, new shoes and all the crap that goes with being female in this dastardly excuse for a civilization. I do go out and yes, when I do, I spend extravagantly, which is again, doing as I please and not at all conducive to ‘living on my limited means.’ But I do count these sorties on one palm of my smallish hands. Also, I have learned to let other people pay, which is something my proud nature once found extraordinarily hard to do.

In other words, doing as you please amounts to living wildly, impulsively, and (apparently) irresponsibly. But here it is, to be responsible to yourself is much harder than to be responsible to other people. It is extraordinarily difficult because first, you are taught it is morally wrong and so every bone in your body rebels against it, second, you have no guarantees and only yourself to fall back on. It doesn’t look like those holiday brochures where you’re on a bloody hammock all day. BUT, when you live this way, you are led inward to your highest treasure: yourself. You are led to the greatest and most sacred truth of all: that you are free, and in your freedom lies the world’s salvation.

The second thing you find when you do as you please, is that your friends show very little sympathy. The sympathy most people share with each other who live utterly enslaved existences in exchange for wages and houses and all the crap they buy (to justify their enslavement and teach their children enslavement) is the sympathy offered by one prisoner to another. A man who refuses the prison cell is immediately the object of generalized contempt. This isn’t because people are assholes, although a large number of people teach themselves to be assholes since they are subjected to assholery all their lives; it isn’t even because they can’t be like you and so they envy you for it, although there is some of that too. Mainly, it is because you have exited the world of their shared sympathies. Since we were all taught sometime in the 18th century that the nation state was a worthy inevitability and that life in strict social classes within this state was also a worthy universality to aspire to, we have all learned to live within our means, which is to say, we have increasingly and totalizingly become OBEDIENT. The price for this obedience is our sanity, self-respect and our entire lives, which is to say our freedom, but the reward is our prosperity, comfort and security. And since we live in an occupied territory (our lives, bodies and impulses), security has gradually replaced fulfilment, freedom and all other values in our minds as a priority. This is what keeps your friends on the straight and narrow: this obsession with security. Which is why, when you exit this obsession with security, you become a pariah.

If you have exited this prison, even if it means living a beggarly existence, you begin to taste freedom in a society that despises, fears and denies it even exists (freedom, that is). Now, you are solely to blame for your own predicament, and interestingly, people show little sympathy for your difficulties when you are solely to blame for them. They sympathize more if you are merely be pitied. That is, when other people do things to you. I respect those who seek out freedom at all costs. This is why I give money to bums, while most of the people around me do not. This is why I know people with chronic diseases or problems find that they constantly must walk a razor’s edge to keep getting sympathy, because if you are once cursed, once excluded, you are required to work hard to keep getting people to love you…

The problem is an old one, nicely represented in the folktale of the ant and the cicada… I am a cicada. I dance through the summer and I sleep through the winter. And if no one will help me, I will dance to my death! But I will not be a drone. That much I know.

And yet, to go inward is the only way to make it going outward. You can’t save the world if you can’t save yourself. Why on earth would you want to ‘save the planet’ when you are terrified of being free of all that destroys it? If you can’t imagine life without your job and the safe structure it provides, you cannot do anything for the bloody planet. Eating organic and saving plastic are not going to do it. The end of life as you know it, is the only way out. The earth, the universe, life: they demand music, dance and drama. They demand caprice, whimsy and personal volition. This is why the old world had gods, while we have machines. Unfortunately, a society driven by rationality, productivity and obedience, where life is a prison occupied by a large army of timid robots (who in turn are obsessed with security, the poor saps) is so powerfully dull, even the earth declares us a lost cause. The earth is bored. The universe is bored. The human race will be destroyed, simply because it doesn’t even know why life is good. Why it’s worth living. If you’re dead even before you’ve died, why on earth would anyone save you? Even the earth wants you dead. And you won’t care. Why would you?

If I as a child had been told my school was burning down, I would not have run to save it. You don’t wish to save that which you despise. We are not unwittingly causing our demise. We have become such a bored, tired race of dull, consuming, apathetic leeches, we just don’t care about life anymore. Life sucks so bad, we don’t mind if it all goes to hell.

So here’s what I propose. I actually believe we are more united when we are disparate, more similar when we are less alike and more caring when we are absolutely free to do as we please. I also believe we are more happy that way even if we struggle more. Peace comes from equivalent, strong people respecting each other’s strength. This is not the same as the 80’s policy of deterrence, which only encourages envy and emulation; this is genuine respect. Deterrence is not respect, it is disguised domination.

Let me give you an example. Recently, I watched a documentary about the Kamayura Indians of the Brazilian Amazon (yes, I watch a lot of documentaries, I’m poor remember?). They had an extraordinary ritual for remembering the dead and commemorating peace between their villages. They cut down four large logs, painted and decorated them, then put them in the ground in the center of one village for a few days. During those days, the women celebrated the ritual of death by the making of salt, and the men wrestled. The men who attended these wrestling matches came from all the neighboring villages. The point was never to get angry or disdainful, and if you did, an elder intervened and fixed things. When everyone had wrestled and either won or lost, the final outcome was the creation of close ties of mutual respect and camaraderie between the villages and the cathartic acting out of mutual aggression so that a more organized and irrational form of egoistic violence (WAR!) could be avoided.

All ancient cultures had similar ritualized events of joy, creativity and violence. Where each individual could play out their abilities and desire for aggression. There were no winners or losers, but there were masters and aspirants. Even our public sporting events are somewhat similar, as are our fairs and carnivals. The playing out of egoistic aggression in play becomes a substitute for actual war. It would work even today, if we weren’t such a repressed, un-free truckload of idiot barbarians.

But let’s come back to the Kamayura Indians and their fairly remarkable ritual. Two things strike me immediately. First, the banality of salt is here sacralized. Second, there is the counter-intuitive logic of violence avoiding violence. Salt, a banal thing nowadays, acquires ritual significance here, and it is only the old women who know how to do it, while wrestling among the men prevents war. Now I’m not one of those who believes you can simply transplant rituals like these into today’s world, that’s balls. But I do believe there is something here which we would do well to learn. Or re-learn.

First, the salt. Well, to me, the ritual sacredness of salt is again, the counter-intuitive thing at work. What seems innocuous isn’t. What seems to be common is not. Salt makes food easier to eat, it therefore not only represents the first stages of human civilization, it also represents a strangely playful and mystical pact between us and nature. Nature as biology and nature as pleasure: our bodies need salt and our tongues enjoy it. In other words, we are told by nature that a spoonful of pleasure makes the food go down. We become through the ritual of salt, creatures of need and of desire, of process and of whimsy, of logic and of art, of the free, organic come and go of that sacred, ancient game between life as utility and life as fun. All this is being said here through the ritual of salt. It is nature’s way of relaying to us her secret circular way: free-wheeling pleasure as creativity, creativity as process, process as necessity, necessity as whimsy, whimsy as pleasure (and back again). This is the full and magnificent circle of life, represented by the female and her own particular knowledge. But you can’t know this is if your life is either process or pleasure. If your life is strictly divided into days for work and days for leisure. If both your pleasure and your work depend on someone else’s desire and never your own. If you don’t know what the hell your life is about, or what significance your life has beyond the damn few pennies you bring home at the end of a gruelling, soul-killing month at work. You will not comprehend the ritual if you have totally and absolutely killed the free-playing spontaneous child within yourself.

But let’s go now to the second part of the ritual. What seems to increase hostility tends to avoid war. What seems to celebrate violence does not. This one is harder. Ostensibly, the wrestling ought to increase competitiveness and ego conflict. But what if this were not the case? We live in a deeply self-denying culture, where only the few, beautiful, rich and successful (the winners) are valued. We live in huge cast-iron hierarchies we never question, from school right down to our jobs. The obedience we learn at school is later played out a million times as we learn to accept conditions we otherwise should not (if obedience had not been schooled into us as children.) We can’t do the work we like, we can’t finance our lives, businesses or projects easily. We can’t live where and how we want, work when we choose, work without some prick breathing down our necks. Everywhere, the individual is under pressure from various institutions he feels smaller than and inferior to: banks, local government and its laws, the police, immigration authorities, tax authorities, landlords, and the enormous and largely invisible hierarchy of social class and class privilege. It’s a subtle interplay between us and a range of people we feel powerless against. And yet, we go on. We are even happy some of the time. Why? How? Because we are accustomed to it all. We are accustomed to escape defined as pleasure. This is why Friday night is everyone’s idea of a good time. We talk arrogantly about ancient Egypt and its so-called slaves (what a laugh!) but we live in abject slavery to a vast machinery of institutions and individuals whose authority we not only never question, we rarely even see it. If anything, we seem to need it. If you lived in a world where you were required to be free and think for yourself, most of you would panic. And that’s a fact!

So let’s take a more concrete example. Let’s say one day of every month, you got to take on your bosses, your teachers, the police, your banker, your tax officer, your in-laws. You got to take on all those who you thought were total and utter hopeless wankers. You got to tell your bankers they couldn’t get a loan, you got to arrest your local cop, you got to audit your tax man and take his hard-earned cash, you got to sit on a bench and judge a judge, you got to stick a tube up your arrogant doctor’s ass. Think about how that would change your relationship with them, and more importantly, theirs with you! What if one day of every month, you got to go into exclusive stores while rich people couldn’t, you got to pay your cab fare with a cabinet minister’s money, you got to kick whichever local bully you despised righteously up the hiney and without intervention. THIS is what is being played out in those Kamayura wrestling matches. We are not talking about the kind of violence we modern brain-slaves are used to: the kind of violence which perpetuates power, where the powerful remain safe, and where only the sad little losers are sent up against each other, doomed to fail. This is not a fixed contest like we live with everyday, where the police, judges, rich and powerful always win. This is not wrestling codified according to class. This is not the rich Romans watching while the gladiators tear each other to pieces. This is the gladiators fighting the senators. This is wrestling to erase class. It is the kind of violence we can only dream of, or watch in our sad, pathetic dreamings of super-heroes and vigilante Russel Crowes. But think of it. Think of a society in which power was constantly questioned. Where there was no facile superiority. In the Kamayura wrestling matches, anyone takes on everyone. And everyone must fight. The masters are respected but they are never beyond being slammed to the ground by a novice. And that’s what guarantees peace. Peace between villages, peace among the many warriors of one single village. This is violence that teaches respect. Chaos that breeds order. Banality that inculcates a feeling for sacred uniqueness. You give what you get, you get what you give. Self-interest for self-sacrifice. You take it and you dish it out.

This is when you realize how utterly fallen we are as a race even as we constantly prate on about our superiority to all other peoples and epochs. Not one of our institutions encourages such equality, not one encourages such camaraderie, cooperation, togetherness and friendship. And this is why even our play looks like war. We are so terribly tragically frustrated as individuals, we can only hang on to a little schadenfreude during our reality-show watching to give us pleasure. It’s all we have. Do you want to save this planet? I sure as hell don’t…

So to come back to doing as you please… From what I have experienced, doing as you please is the most rebellious act you can commit. It derails the whole idea of the Enlightenment, according to which the elites do as they please, while the rest of us live in a soup of ‘rationality’ which stems not from our own individual recipes but from some inordinately complicated set of principles enshrined somewhere, usually in a set of documents held up by a highly repressive nation-state. To do as you please means to live of yourself, by yourself, through yourself and in and out of yourself. To do as you please is therefore the most radical notion of all. It is not anti-social, rather, in a superbly counter-intuitive way, it is in fact the highest notion of society that can exist. If we cannot imagine such a society, it doesn’t mean it cannot exist. It simply means we lack the vision to see it. True society is formed of individuals, not of clone drones, which is what we are trained to be in our schools, jobs and all the rest of it. Just as marriage, the highest kind, requires that both individuals continue to grow as individuals if they are to continue to evolve as a married couple, just as violence can avoid war, just as banality affords a glimpse of uniqueness.

A Latin-American writer called Eduardo Galeano wrote a book called Patas Arriba, or Upside Down. That’s what we are. We think we’re free but we’re not. We don’t see that we are slaves but we are. Power and repression being ubiquitous, we think they’re invisible. While freedom seems so unattainable, we scoff at anyone who speaks of it as an ‘idealist.’ But power and freedom are like air. Whichever kind you breathe defines how healthy you are. You breathe repression everyday and everyday you die a little. But you begin to breathe freedom and your body comes alive with joy.

So try it, just think about it, and feel the fear grip your entrails. And then think about living this way. The world will be saved and (re)built in a day, hell, even if Rome wasn’t…

Tags: amazon indians, authority, kamayura, nation-state, obedience, ritual of salt-making

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 10th, 2010 at 10:46 pm and is filed under Amita's Blog . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.