I didn’t get a circle A tattoo, but I might as well have.
One of the most influential things I discovered in books was anarchism: the idea that we could live without rulers. That it is our responsibility to resist the concentration of power in any single entity, be it corporate, governmental, or religious.
It’s a worldview that’s helped me understand the world and make decisions ever since I was seventeen. I was in the market for a new moral framework since Christianity was no longer working for me. My Catholic all-boys highschool was a stifling environment that I had been immersed in for years, but I remember the precise moment of my disenchantment: a grade twelve religion class taught by a gym teacher who didn’t even try to answer the questions I had.
In a way it was similar to why I set down fantasy novels in favour of science fiction — the hand-waving magical explanations weren’t as satisfying as complex rational ones. So I yanked out the RELIGION cartridge in my brain and chunked in the POLITICS one.
And there it remained for 30 years. Until now.
***
I’ve always involved politics in my art. To strike a balance between something meaningful and something entertaining is my goal, both because it’s what I like to read and because I think it’s more effective.
In some ways I fall short of what I consider the Orwellian ideal of political writing. His work gave us the boogeyman of Big Brother, which has given us a strong societal resistance to pervasive surveillance, and a number of useful terms like doublespeak. But 1984 as a work of art is pretty weak. It’s an implausibly horrific society, especially when compared to Brave New World — there are no pleasures like soma to rationalize why the citizens are so compliant. And it’s basically an English cover version of the Russian novel We, which Orwell reviewed glowingly.
When you see his other writing, which is usually far subtler and original, it’s confusing that his last work was not. But he wrote 1984 on his deathbed, and I believe it was a sense of urgency that made him create such a politically pointed work — he felt Britain needed to be scared like he was scared reading We. So he wrote a horror story about a boot stomping down on the face of humanity forever, crawling with rats and no redemption.
In contrast, my work is much less politically consistent: all of my dystopias have silver linings, and all my utopias have a dark underbelly. But I find solace in a moment of Ursula K. LeGuin’s depiction of a school lesson in an anarchist society in The Dispossessed. The students are shown pictures of decadent capitalists sunbathing with jewels in their glistening navels, and instead of feeling appropriate disgust they are titillated. Reading that made me believe in the society more, rather than less, and has inspired those of us seeking to build alternatives. So while 1984 has had a broader social impact, Dispossessed has had a narrower but deeper impact in subcultural thought.
I’ve also been intrigued by a choice I discovered in the director’s commentary of Get Out. Jordan Peele explained that a more bleak ending had been shot along with a happier one. The script had been written during the Obama years with the intent to show that racism was not, in fact, over. But as the movie was coming out after Trump’s election, Peele went with the happier ending “because we needed a win.” It flies in the face of a lot of “great art is timeless” rhetoric: Peele chose to give people of his political orientation a moment of relief instead of kicking them when they were down, even when the bleak ending was his original artistic vision.
My most recent work is a story I’ve been working on which explores the issue of how far would you go to keep your people safe, and it resonates with the refugee crisis. In it there is the opportunity to paint one side as the villain, a la 1984, but instead I try to present them both as sympathetically as I can. There is a lot of opportunity in genre fiction to conflate extremists with evil, or at least psychotically ill.
But when people are extremists, they’re often extremists for an understandable reason.
***
And I know this, because I’ve spent most of my life as an extremist, albeit of the quiet variety. The reason anarchism appealed to me so strongly that I was intensely distrustful of authority because my primary authority figure, my father, proved himself unworthy of power when I was eight. After cheating on my mom, and leaving our family, I hated him for ten years until I represented my mom in a child support case and got to cross-examine him in a court of law. (A rite of passage I highly recommend.)
And many of my anarchist friends have similar stories of bad dads. We often characterise it as when we “woke up” to the tyranny of authoritarianism, but on a more emotional level it was trauma. Other people have had positive relationships with their father’s authority, and are OK giving up some freedom in exchange for security. People who’ve had bad experiences with cops instead of helpful ones see only their freedoms being curtailed without receiving any feeling of protection.
Similarly, my analogues on the extreme right understand that the basic idea behind the social safety net is that will take care of them if they need it — but they don’t believe it. They make sacrifices to amass individual wealth because they feel that when they’re sick or destitute no one will take care of them. They resent taxes because they feel like it’s every person for themselves, and they feel like that for a reason. Maybe they didn’t get the nurturance and care they needed from their mother, or a pivotal time in their childhood.
If you (perhaps rightly) balk at right/left wing inclinations being boiled town to mommy/daddy issues, there’s also some quantitative science to point at physiological differences. In Prius or Pickup?, the authors highlight the differences conservatives have from liberals in recovering from being startled. (They measure it via how long it takes for a person to stop blinking more than usual.) People with a higher than usual startle effect would naturally prioritize safety over freedom.
This is all to say, the differences we have aren’t really just differences in opinions on issues, but fundamentally different natural reactions. How can high level political discourse occur when baselines are so different?
***
We’re in a time where the veneer of rational thought has disappeared from politics, where neither side even understands what the other wants. It’s an anti-intellectual time. I know for myself that politics are engaging because I have a brain for complex ideas, because I feel comfortable and confident puzzling things out. But for a lot of people? Politics just makes them feel stupid and overwhelmed.
The right is tired of worring about telling the wrong kind of jokes or having to keep track of pronouns and and votes in a blowhard: they aspire to his shamelessness and he doesn’t make them feel guilty or dumb. The left is fed up and wants to punch nazis without understanding that you don’t wear a swastika unless you have some deep untended trauma.
So I think we need to go back to basics, abandon much of this terminology and machinery that’s serving to polarize us more than connect us. For me that means helping men outside my bubble tend to their emotional wounds so they stop lashing out. From this place, curiosity can lead to learning about other people’s lived experience.
I don’t talk politics with them. I don’t feel the need. Mutual support, trust, and empathy makes the network that connects us all visible.
***
Recently I’ve been into ambient drone music like Stars of the Lid, non-melodic music that builds and swell and recede. The body-felt tones remind me of the low sounds of the church organ. I receive wonder in a high-ceilinged train station or a forest the way others feel the glory of god in a cathedral. The sage in smudging ceremonies I do curls together with the incense of the mass from my childhood.
These rituals put us in a receptive state, bypass the rational and the immediate. Too often they are used to manipulate, but this is the risk with powerful things. I have enough distance from my Catholic upbringing at my age to reclaim some of these methods for my own ends. Truthfully the bloodless way most traditional churches use rituals by rote obscure their power. Parables should be stories that take us on a journey and connect us with a relatable human truth, but they do not do this for me. Priests rarely have the life experience or passion to deliver a sermon that feels authentic. Thanks to the church I associated anything ritualistic with mind control and hypocrisy, and now I feel anger towards the church for claiming these tools as theirs and then using them so ineffectively. It essentially deprives many people of ritual’s comforts and powers.
Politics claim superiority over emotions, and become dominated by it. Religion claims superiority over rationality, and becomes a tool to wield power. As I lose some of my reverence for politics and gain some appreciation for religion, I feel myself coming into a new kind of balance.
I’m not saying I’m going to replace that POLITICS cartridge with a NEW AGE one. I’m just taking a moment to pause, pull it out, look at it, and blow out the dust.
***
Thanks to Jason Turner for the illustrations above. Thanks to Miranda Clark, Jermaine Bagnall, & Neil Braganza for feedback.
The title is the first line from a well-known song that kept going through my head as I wrote this essay but it wasn’t quite right and would have been way too corny.
I do know that blowing on cartridges doesn’t help. But rituals are powerful.
If you find this subject interesting you might want to listen to the companion interview in The Joy of Being Wrong. This episode is with old friend and collaborator Paolo Perdercini, a political game creator from Italy and Pittsburgh.
This is a part of the Fallow Year Essays, reflective pieces on art and cultural production I’m writing now that I’m 20 years deep into my practice. Previous articles are about productivity, money, self-discipline, and nurturing.
If you’d like to see me continue to make stuff for another twenty years, you can encourage me by signing up for my mailing list:
