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\title{The Revolution Will Be Hilarious and Other Essays}
\date{2018}
\author{Adam Krause}
\subtitle{}






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\chapter{Author’s Introduction}


This collection of essays came about when New Compass
Press informed me that the tiny pamphlet I had written
for them, “The Revolution Will Be Hilarious,” had proven
just too tiny to publish economically. Rather than take it out
of print, they asked, would I add some essays and let them
do The Revolution Will Be Hilarious and Other Essays? My
first thought was that this would be impossible. The things
I have written since “The Revolution Will Be Hilarious”
appeared in 2013 are very different in tone and style, and
could seemingly never inhabit the same volume as that
earlier essay.


“The Revolution Will Be Hilarious” uses the structure
of jokes as an extended metaphor to explain the psychology
of democracy. My current work focuses much more on
the environmental apocalypse we are now experiencing.


My tone is more urgent and strident—to such an extent
that I have even accepted using terms like “environmental
apocalypse.” “The Revolution Will Be Hilarious” seemed
like a work from a simpler time, back when I thought we
had more time.


Why the change in focus? The mistake I made, if it is a
mistake, was adopting the habit of reading scientific journals.


And recently, there has been a remarkable shif in tone.


Rather than just saying that we have to do something or our
environment will collapse, most scientists now seem to say
that we have to do something because our environment is
already collapsing. It is a subtle, but terrifying, shif. And
there is no shortage of evidence to support it. Ice sheets are
collapsing. Species are disappearing. Lakes are evaporating,
making agriculture impossible in many places. People starve.


The oceans are losing fish, but are filling with plastic. Tings
are not looking good. We are in the midst of something
awful and unprecedented. Analyzing jokes to explain how
democracy works suddenly seemed like an antiquated
concern from a forgotten era.


But as I worked on some newer essays, under the
impression that The Revolution Will Be Hilarious and Other
Essays would be impossible, those seemingly quaint concerns
came rushing back as central ones. In fact, some of the essays I
assumed had supplanted “The Revolution Will Be Hilarious”
actually precede and prepare the way for it.


The first piece in this volume, “THE END IS NEAR,” was
originally released on my own imprint, Red Earth Press. Each
copy was hand-made, and there really weren’t that many, so
I am very excited for it to appear here, where at least the
words can live on even afer that limited edition disappears.


“THE END IS NEAR” begins by discussing some of the many
prophecies of apocalypse humans have heard in the preceding
centuries. And since the world has been declared nearly over
so often, why should we believe contemporary warnings of
an environmental apocalypse? Well, as I mentioned above,
because there is ample evidence that irreversible ecological
collapse has already begun.


So if that’s the case, how should we react? Do we panic?
Stockpile gold? Build an army? Pray? Mostly, we need to
get to work, but we don’t need to panic, provided we get to
work. And there are examples among those past prophets
of doom who saw an impending apocalypse as a chance
for transformation, not just fighting in the streets for the
remaining crumbs.


In “THE END IS NEAR,” I quote Naomi Klein’s statement
that
“Mass uprisings of people—along the lines of the
abolition movement and the Civil Rights Movement—
represent the likeliest source of ‘friction’ to slow down an
economic machine that is careening out of control.”\footnote{Naomi Klein, “Can Climate Change Unite the Left?” In These Times, October 13, 2014.} I agree
of course. But this statement requires elaboration. Both the
abolition movement and the Civil Rights Movement were
full of very contentious debates about tactics. If the time
has already passed when we should have started a mass
movement, the time has also passed when we should know
how to proceed. Who are the targets? How do we stop them?


And although these are not topics we typically discuss aloud,
is sabotage acceptable? What about violence?


So in “What Is To Be Done?, I analyze issues of ethics
and tactics in political actions, with a special focus on the
environmental movement. I did not begin writing this essay
with a thesis to explain, but rather, a topic to explore. I had
no idea what I would conclude, only that I would write. As
such, this second essay took on a very different form from
“THE END IS NEAR.” In “THE END IS NEAR,” I present
short, often impressionistic explorations of various topics,
and let the whole piece collectively present an idea. Sections
are short. Topics shift. In “What Is To Be Done?” I explore
the topic as I go, and the reader can follow my thoughts as
I unpack a difficult subject and try to figure out how I really
feel about it.


Although I began without a destination in mind, I
eventually arrived somewhere, and much to my surprise,
it was the idea that the revolution would be hilarious. In
“What Is To Be Done?” I conclude that whatever movements
we build or tactics we choose, those movements need to be
inclusive and broad. So the lessons comedy can teach us
about democracy are essential to answering the question of
just what is to be done.


And so “The Revolution Will Be Hilarious” not only
remains, but has proven itself essential. But for this new
context, it was necessary to revise and expand the original text.


I have no problem with that. Walt Whitman, who I refer to
as the “patron saint” of “The Revolution Will Be Hilarious,”
first published Leaves of Grass in 1855, and then spent the rest
of his life expanding and altering it in numerous editions of
various lengths. So rewriting and revising previously published
works is a practice with an impressive pedigree. Plus, an essay
that spends so much time urging us to rethink our ideas and
assumptions deserves to be periodically rethought.


In the time since its initial publication, various people
have talked or written to me about “The Revolution Will Be
Hilarious.” In particular, Molly Shanahan utilized it while
working on her doctoral thesis and sent me a number of
helpful suggestions and observations. In particular, she
suggested that “bisociation,” a term I borrowed from Arthur
Koestler, would make much more sense as “multisociation.”


Following “The Revolution Will Be Hilarious” is “Buy
The Land and Buy The Light,” an essay originally presented
as a paper at the Ecological Challenges Conference at the
University of Oslo in 2017. Using businesses that sell the
naming rights to stars as a starting point, I discuss changes
in land ownership and usage in the capitalist era, with a
particular focus on the United States. The notion that one
can purchase a piece of property, put up a fence and then tear
the earth to bits to extract resources (and no one can stop
you because it’s yours) is a very new and very dangerous idea
that has somehow become accepted as common sense. The
mistreatment of the original inhabitants of North America
accelerated along with the development of these new
notions of private property, and continue into the present,
with battles over pipelines and fracked oil as an especially
egregious example.


“The Revolution Will Be Hilarious” dances around
various topics I couldn’t actually discuss without making it
an unreadable mess. “Time Is Not Money,” acts almost as an
appendix to “The Revolution Will Be Hilarious,” clarifying
some of the underlying ideas that essay leaves unsaid. And
although it was composed from sections I cut from “The
Revolution Will Be Hilarious,” it ended up as a surprisingly
cohesive piece on its own.


Concluding this volume is “Walking Each Other Home,”
another essay I published as a pamphlet on Red Earth Press.


I wrote it afer revisiting “The Revolution Will Be Hilarious”
and it shows. I guess my writing has changed again. In
“Walking Each Other Home,” I explore the idea of “home.”


What is it? Why is it important? What does it mean to be
homeless? How can anyone be “illegal”? The demands for
openness, acceptance, and universal love made in


“The
Revolution Will Be Hilarious” are made again, but perhaps
even more strongly and explicitly.


So this collection of essays begins with some rather
urgent, occasionally depressing essays about the state of our
planet, moves to a revised version of an older essay with
comparatively more hope and positivity, and concludes with
what I created afer editing all that together. Life on Earth
remains in incredible danger. I remain alarmed and angry.


But in addition to that continuing rage, I have returned to
emphasizing the seemingly simple notion that we must
grow as a species, and learn to live in harmony with the
natural world and one another. If we fail to do this, the end
remains near. But I have returned to stating why and how
we can change. And if I end up spending the rest of my life
demanding that we treat each other and our shared habitat
with love and respect, then I will, but hopefully humanity will
wake up to the immense peril we are in very soon.


This seemed like an impossible project. I was ready to
reject it. But by bringing it into existence, my writing and
focus changed again. Carefully revising an older essay—
an essay I thought I had moved beyond—caused various
iterations of my writing self to collide and create a new one.


I am very proud of what appears in this book, but I could
not have done it alone. A debt of gratitude goes to Eirik Eiglad
and everyone else at New Compass Press for continuing to
believe in me and my work. Endless thanks go to Marielle
Allschwang for allowing me to read almost everything I write
aloud to her, giving me more suggestions than I would ever
care to count, agreeing to spend her life with me, and bringing
me to that Shaker museum. I would also like to thank David
Ravel and Richard Newman for taking me to meet Dabls.


That was amazing.


It was a winding journey of exploration, research, and
wildly different drafs that brought me to completing this
volume. Creating it changed my thinking. Hopefully reading
it can have a similar effect. I hope you enjoy it.

\chapter{THE END IS NEAR}



\begin{quote}


 \emph{— And as things fell apart,}


 \emph{nobody paid much attention.}


Talking Heads\footnote{Talking Heads, “(Nothing But) Flowers,” Naked. Warner Bros., LP. Released March 1988.}



\end{quote}


The end of the world has seemingly been upon us for
as long as there has been a world, which makes it easy
to dismiss and deride prophets of doom. A few thousand
years ago, Jesus told his disciples that soon “the sun shall be
darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars
of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall
be shaken.”\footnote{Mark 13:24–25 (King James).} And when would this occur? “Verily I say unto
you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be
done.”\footnote{Mark 13:30.} Standing before him was the last generation. The end
of time was near.


And his followers believed it. The Epistle to the Hebrews,
written around 63 or 64 CE, begins, “God, who at sundry
times and in divers manners spake in times past unto the
fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto
us by his son.”\footnote{Heb. 1:1–2.} The First Epistle of John, written about thirty
years later, states, “Little children, it is the last time: and as
ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now there are
many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time.”\footnote{1 John 2:18.}


Yet the world did not end.


Maybe Christ had been delayed. In 1806, in a village near
Leeds, England, a hen laid an egg inscribed with the words
“Christ Is Coming.” Prayers were said. Skies were watched.


There was repentance and panic. But the egg was either a
forgery or the hen had been misinformed. Once again, the
world did not end.\footnote{Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841: New York: Tree Rivers Press, 1980), 269–70.}


In 1996, Sheldan Nidle, who claims to have been
receiving extraterrestrial communications since he was a
child, announced that 16 million spaceships, which is quite
a few if you think about it, would arrive on December 17,
heralding humanity’s end. But the aliens did not arrive, and
humanity carried on.\footnote{See \href{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sheldan\_nidle./}{https:\Slash{}\Slash{}en.wikipedia.org\Slash{}wiki\Slash{}Sheldan\_Nidle.}}


More recently, a set of cycles in the Mayan’s now-rarely-
used calendar were set to cease in 2012, which some people
decided meant the world would also end. But temporal
units are human inventions, not facts of nature, so why one
culture’s means of marking time would impact the physical
world is unclear. But a lot of people took this seriously. Once
again, the world did not end.


These are just a few examples. An even remotely
exhaustive list of apocalyptic predictions would fill volumes.


There are always people who hope or fear they will be the
last. Mostly hope. Afer all, it can be hard to pass the Earth
on to the next generation and accept death and irrelevance.


How much better it would be to stand at the end of history
as the final generation—with gods, angels, or extraterrestrials
on their way to let us know that there shall (of course) be
none after us. But these portents of doom never show, and the
world moves on. We are buried and forgotten.


The end of humanity is being predicted again. But
this time, we probably shouldn’t scoff. The reasons are
more scientific, less supernatural, and for once, pretty
convincing. We are destroying—or perhaps have already
destroyed—the environment that sustains us. We are
not near the end of humanity because gods or aliens
have deemed us special, but because we’re the idiots who
couldn’t figure out how to maintain our own habitat. And
that shouldn’t fuel anyone’s hubris.


Here is a tiny sample of the current crop of prophets of
doom. Linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky writes
that due to our terrifying combination of environmental
destruction and rampant militarism, human civilization “may
now be approaching its inglorious end.”\footnote{Noam Chomsky, “The End of History?” In These Times, September 4, 2014.} The film director
Werner Herzog stated in an interview, “I’m convinced that
our presence on this planet is not sustainable, so we will
be extinct fairly soon.”\footnote{“Werner Herzog: Trust in My Wild Fantasies,” The Talks, January 30, 2013.} Journalist and environmentalist
Bill McKibben writes, “We remain in denial about the peril
that human civilization is in.”\footnote{Bill McKibben, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” Rolling Stone, July 19, 2012.} In his encyclical on the
environment, Pope Francis writes, “Doomsday predictions
can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be
leaving to coming generations debris, desolation, and filth.”\footnote{Francis. Laudato Si: Praise Be To You; On Care for Our Common Home (Vatican City, Italy: Libreria Editrice Vatanica, 2015), [161].}

\section{You Must Go On, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On}



\begin{quote}


 \emph{— Seems there’s always more duty.}


 \emph{Maybe that’s the beauty.}


Mike Watt\footnote{Mike Watt, “Shore Duty,” Contemplating the Engine Room. Columbia, LP. Released 1997.}



\end{quote}


Rather than emanating from Pat Robertson or castrated cult
members committing mass suicide in matching shoes, these
recent apocalyptic predictions are different. Arctic ice is
melting at increasing rates, giving us easier access to once-
inaccessible fossil fuels. The irony of this would be hilarious
if it weren’t terrifying. Ice shelves in the Antarctic that were
not expected to collapse for decades are already collapsing.


Heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires are occurring with
alarming frequency. And there are already more fossil
fuels ready for use—claimed and accounted for by oil
companies—than we can safely burn without experiencing
total cataclysm. This is not narcissism. Humanity is
approaching its end.


In an article about despair among climate scientists—
people whose job it is to discover and explain all the bad
news about our planet—Camille Parmesan of the University
of Texas states:



\begin{quote}


To be honest, I panicked fifeen years ago—that was when
the first studies came out showing that Arctic tundras were
shifing from being a net sink to being a net source of CO2.
That along with the fact this butterfly I was studying shifed its
entire range across half a continent—I said this is big, this is
big. Everything since then has just confirmed it.\footnote{John H. Richardson, “When the End of Human Civilization is Your Day Job,” Esquire, July 7, 2015.}



\end{quote}


She continues, “Do I think it likely that the nations of the
world will take sufficient action to stabilize climate in the
next fify years? No, I don’t think it likely.”\footnote{Ibid.} Which would
of course be a rather problematic bit of inaction. As John H.
Richardson states earlier in the article:



\begin{quote}


Arctic air temperatures are increasing at twice the rate of
the rest of the world—a study by the U. S. Navy says that the
Arctic could lose its summer sea ice by next year, eighty-four
years ahead of the models—and evidence little more than a
year old suggests the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is doomed,
which will add between twenty and twenty-five feet to ocean
levels. The one hundred million people in Bangladesh will
need another place to live and coastal cities globally will be
forced to relocate, a task complicated by economic crisis
and famine—with continental interiors drying out, the chief
scientist at the U. S. State Department in 2009 predicted a
billion people will suffer famine within twenty or thirty
years.\footnote{Ibid.}



\end{quote}


What can we do to stop the destruction? The fossil fuel
industry has an immense amount of power and money, and
would love nothing more than to continue wielding power
and amassing money. Politicians are bought. Disinformation
campaigns are funded. What can we, with so much less power
and money, do to stop them? Afer all, global capitalism is
designed to generate the most profit for the fewest people
in the shortest time. The Earth and most of its inhabitants
are merely means to these ends. Resources are plundered
indiscriminately, and the people living on top of those
resources usually have too little power to stop the plunder.
Landscapes become moonscapes. The rich get richer and the
poor suffer. The rest of us remain largely indifferent for no
reason whatsoever.


And we have prepared ourselves in the worst possible
way to handle our coming catastrophes humanely. We just
lived through the bloodiest and most genocidal century
in history. As a point of comparison, somewhere between
3,000 and 5,000 people died in the Spanish Inquisition. That
was pretty bad, but in the twentieth century, Stalin alone
was responsible for ordering tens of millions of deaths. And
that was just one bit of genocide in a century of genocide
after genocide. Something has gone horribly wrong with
humanity. We are not ready to handle our impending
ecological disasters in ways that won’t involve massive
bloodshed, suffering, and despair. And the weapons we have
now could kill every living thing on Earth. If that’s really
where we’ve gotten ourselves, our situation seems hopeless.


So what can we do?


The interview in which Werner Herzog stated that
“we will be extinct fairly soon” ends with the following
exchange:



\begin{quote}


Q: Does our impending extinction worry you?


A: It doesn’t make me nervous that we’ll become extinct,
it doesn’t frighten me at all. There is a wonderful thing that
Martin Luther the reformer said when he was asked, “What
would you do if the world would disappear tomorrow in the
apocalypse?” And Luther said, “Today, I would plant an apple
tree.”


Q: Do you believe in a superior being?


A: Oh, don’t ask that—but if I knew that tomorrow a meteorite
would destroy our planet, I would start shooting a new film
today.\footnote{“Werner Herzog: Trust In My Wild Fantasies.”}



\end{quote}


Like Luther planting a tree whose fruit he knows he will
never see, we ought to start that film, stop the fossil fuel
industry from existing, end factory farming, ban nuclear
weapons and nuclear power—so we don’t kill ourselves by
other means before we get the chance to save ourselves—and
destroy militarism, nationalism, and borders. In spite of our
apparently hopeless situation, we should not lose hope or
stop trying.


Intense action now is our only hope. As individuals and as
a species, we ought to follow the advice Miguel de Unamuno
draws from Don Quixote: “Redress whatever wrong comes
your way. Do now what must be done now and do here what
must be done here.”\footnote{Miguel de Unamuno, Our Lord Don Quixote, (1905: Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 16.} As Naomi Klein writes, “Mass uprisings
of people—along the lines of the abolition movement and
the Civil Rights Movement—represent the likeliest source of
‘friction’ to slow down an economic machine that is careening
out of control.”\footnote{Klein, “Can Climate Change Unite the Left?”}

\section{The End Was Here}



\begin{quote}


 \emph{— Yeah it’s all coming back to me now,}


 \emph{my apocalypse, my apocalypse.}


Bill Callahan\footnote{Bill Callahan, “One Fine Morning,” Apocalypse. Drag City, LP. Released 2011.}



\end{quote}


Our economy and our world are not only careening out of
control, but veering in the path of apocalypse. Or perhaps
we’ve already smashed into it. Several years ago, I was riding
in a van to a city I had never been. I was engrossed in a book.


I looked up. We had entered the city. I was in one of many
vehicles on the highway. The overpasses and underpasses
were filled with cars reflecting the sun. It was a beautiful
day. I felt perhaps the same exhilaration of movement and
machines as Marinetti. It was the Kantian sublime, triggered
by cars and concrete. I was overwhelmed with beauty and
horror. Then it hit me. The world had already ended. We had
poisoned the Earth. There was no hope. Our planet lay on
its deathbed, drifting into oblivion, and we were driving on
it. The apocalypse had passed with little notice, and we had
entered the long, hard dénouement of human civilization. It
was a strong, strange feeling, and it stuck with me.


In Alan Moore’s comic book Promethea, there is an
apocalypse. The story and the world, though transformed,
continue. As one character says, “We all woke up, the day
after the world ended, and we still had to feed ourselves and
keep a roof over our heads. Life goes on, y’know? Life goes
on.”\footnote{Alan Moore, Promethea: Collected Edition; Book 5, (New York: DC Comics, 2003).} The idea that an apocalypse is not necessarily an end
makes etymological sense. “Apocalypse” comes from the
Greek for an uncovering or revelation. It is less destruction
than disclosure. So maybe I was right. Maybe we’ve passed
the apocalypse. But maybe life goes on afer the world ends.


And maybe there’s still hope.


If we continue on our current path, we will doom billions
of future humans to famines and wars. To quote Pope Francis
again:



\begin{quote}


The natural environment is a collective good, the patrimony
of all humanity and the responsibility of everyone. If we make
something our own, it is only to administer it for the good of
all. If we do not, we burden our consciences with the weight
of having denied the existence of others. That is why the New
Zealand bishops asked what the commandment “Thou shall
not kill” means when “twenty percent of the world’s population
consumes resources at a rate that robs the poor nations and
future generations of what they need to survive.”\footnote{Francis, Laudato Si, [95].}



\end{quote}


Our environmental crisis is also an ethical crisis. Our lifestyles
are based on the exploitation and destruction of the natural
world and the world’s poor. The people of the first world denude
and degrade the land on which far less politically powerful
people live. All that death and destruction usually takes place
far from us, so we don’t have to watch. And we don’t. But if we
want to do anything even remotely close to the right thing, we
will stop living as we do. The notion that our lifestyles won’t
need to change that much to save the Earth is nonsense. We
don’t just need to use better lightbulbs or something. Our
lifestyles need to change. We cannot continue taking part in
the murder of the Earth and its inhabitants.

\section{Endgame Strategies}



\begin{quote}


 \emph{— It’s afer the end of the world!}


 \emph{Don’t you know that yet?}


Sun Ra\footnote{Sun Ra, It’s Afer the End of the World. BASF, LP. Released 1972.}



\end{quote}


This is humanity’s endgame. In chess, endgames occur when
very few pieces remain on the board. Exactly when the
middlegame ends and the endgame begins is ofen unclear,
but endgames are distinct. Pawns become more important.


Kings enter the open and attack. Poor endgame tactics can
destroy a once-overwhelming advantage, while a cleverly
waged endgame can turn a hopeless situation into a victory.


Of course, not all games even get that far.


In Samuel Beckett’s 1957 play Endgame, there is one act
in one room. Hamm sits dying in his chair, unable to stand.


Clov, limping and unable to sit, waits on him. There are also
two trash cans on stage where Nell and Nagg live. There is
a window stage lef, and another stage right, but there is no
light or life outside.



\begin{quote}


Hamm: Nature has forgotten us.


Clov: There’s no more nature.


Hamm: No more nature! You exaggerate.


Clov: In the vicinity.


Hamm: But we breathe, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth!


Our bloom! Our ideals!


Clov: Then she hasn’t forgotten us.\footnote{Samuel Beckett, Endgame: A Play in One Act (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 11.}



\end{quote}


Nature only remains as rot, decay, and death. The other end
of the life cycle has ceased. Nothing is born. Nothing is new.



\begin{quote}


Hamm: Did your seeds come up?


Clov: No.


Hamm: Did you scratch round them to see if they had


sprouted?


Clov: They haven’t sprouted.


Hamm: Perhaps it’s too early.


Clov: If they were going to sprout they would have sprouted.


(Violently.) They’ll never sprout!\footnote{Ibid., 13.}



\end{quote}


Throughout the play, the characters remain stuck in patterns.


Hamm asks for his painkillers. Nell and Nagg reminisce. Clov
walks from window to window, moving like a chess piece,
limited by the rules of play and positions of pieces.


But there is a glimmer of hope near the end of the play.


With Nagg and Nell dead, and Hamm about to die, Clov
either sees or hallucinates a small boy outside in the distance.
Hamm is unmoved. “If he exists he’ll die there or he’ll come
here. And if he doesn’t\dots{}”\footnote{Ibid., 78.} Clov gets dressed and packed.


He’s leaving. But he might stay. The curtain closes. We don’t
know if he ever moves.


People rarely change until circumstances force them. And
even then, people rarely change. Will we ever even try to save
our habitat, or will we wait until there is no light, life, or love
left, and then just stand there, still not quite sure if we should
do something or not?


Do something.


Do something.


Do something.

\section{Shaking Toward the Millennium}



\begin{quote}


 \emph{Hark! What means this dreadful sound?}


 \emph{Hear the rumor all around!}


 \emph{Wars and tumults greet our ears;}


 \emph{Lo! The latter day appears.}


Shaker Hymn



\end{quote}


We certainly need to do something, do something, do
something, but what should we do? Action and hope, not
fear and worry, are the answers. Christianity, a belief system
obsessed with the end of the world, has dominated and
shaped Western culture for thousands of years. We can learn
a lot from the ways humans have reacted to all those regularly
promised apocalypses. Terror and panic have not been the
only reactions. Repentance and radical transformations have
also occurred.


The Shakers, a millennial Christian group formed in the
late 1700s, are of particular interest. Millennial movements
are focused on the end of the world, with the idea of the
millennium coming from the Book of Revelation, where it
states:



\begin{quote}


And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key
of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he
laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the devil,
and Satan, and bound him a thousand years. [\dots{}] And I saw
thrones, and they sat upon them: and I saw the souls of them
that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word
of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his
image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads,
or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a
thousand years.\footnote{Revelation 20: 1–2, 4.}



\end{quote}


Millennial movements believe the just will rule with Jesus
for a thousand years, and there will be peace, prosperity,
and plenty. Then the Devil will be released, and the final
judgement will take place.


In the still nascent United States of the eighteenth century,
the millennium was frequently declared imminent or already
underway. In the 1740s, Jonathan Edwards sparked the Great
Awakening, a millennial movement fueled by fears of hell
fire. But the world never ended, and enthusiasm waned. Then
in the 1770s, the New Light Stir revived millennial beliefs.
Concurrent with the American Revolution, political upheaval
added credence to the coming of a spiritual revolution.


The Revolutionary War happened, but the devil was never
chained, and Christ never came.


Or perhaps he did. And maybe he was a she. In 1747,
John and Jane Wardley of Manchester, England broke
from the Quakers and founded the Shakers in an attempt
to recover the excitement and ecstatic millenarianism
of the Quakers’ early years.\footnote{Richard Francis, Ann the Word: The Story of Ann Lee, Female Messiah, Mother of the Shakers, The Woman Clothed with the Sun (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2013), 25.} A woman named Ann Lee
joined them in 1758. She was soon declared the female
manifestation of Christ, a unity of gender manifestations
that completed the appearance of Christ on Earth, and thus
heralded the millennium. In 1774, Ann Lee and a small
band of Shakers left Manchester for a United States on the
brink of rebellion.\footnote{Ibid., 71.}


The Shakers were a millennial movement, but they had
a peculiar notion of the second coming of Christ. For the
Shakers, the millennium would be built by creating a critical
mass of manifested Christs. The messiah would be a collective
creation. Ann Lee’s transformation was not only possible for
everyone, but required of everyone. She was just the first to
make the metamorphosis.


Ann Lee presented herself as a first among equals, not
a special human fit for worship. “She refused to be deified.


If her followers kneeled to her, she would kneel with them,
saying, ‘It is not me you love, but it is God in me.’”\footnote{Deborah E. Burns, Shaker Cities of Peace, Love, and Union: A History of the Hancock Bishopric (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993), 14.} She simply
pointed the way toward perfection for everyone. And like
their “Mother Ann,” Shakers renounced family and sexual
intercourse, so Christ could be manifested in humanity and
the millennium could get underway. There would be peace,
prosperity, and plenty.


In our present situation, the onset of the millennium is
less a concern than the disappearance of the natural world.


But whether we’re Shakers in the eighteenth century or
environmentally endangered beings in the twenty-first, a
critical mass of changed minds is necessary. Radically new
ways of seeing and being—total metamorphoses that overturn
everything, manifested in everyone—are our only hope.


There is another lesson we can learn from the Shakers.


They are remembered today, not for the end-time religion
of Ann Lee, but for building Utopian communities and
thoughtfully constructed furniture. Just as Jesus predicted
an imminent end that never came, causing his followers
to eventually give in and create structured organizations
that could survive centuries, the Shakers made some of the
longest lasting Utopian communities in modern history, an
achievement “Ann Lee knew nothing of, and in which she
would have taken no interest.”\footnote{Francis, Ann the Word, 336.}


Changed minds can be powerful and transformative. But
changed minds that work together can reshape the world. To
quote an essay entitled “‘What Must I Do?’ at the End of the
World,”



\begin{quote}


Faced with the catastrophe, there are those who get indignant,
those who take note, those who denounce, and those who get
organized. History depends on those who get organized.\footnote{“‘What Must I Do?’ at the End of the World,” Woodbine, May 16, 2014.}



\end{quote}


If our stories will be written in anything other than the
fossil record, we can’t just individually manifest new modes
of thinking. We’ll need to harmoniously orchestrate our
actions—not as a single, rigid being, but as a beautiful array of
illuminated minds, attacking our problems from every angle.


Humans made this mess, and we can unmake it. Revolutions
are required, but they’ll differ from those of centuries past.


Rather than dethroning kings from solitary seats of power so
we can take their place, we need to dethrone everyone, then
destroy the thrones, share our power, and work together.


The end is near. But it doesn’t have to be.

\chapter{What is to be Done?}



\begin{quote}


 \emph{— I might be ready to embrace a snake, but, if one comes}


 \emph{to bite you, I should kill it and protect you.}


Mohandas Gandhi\footnote{Mohandas Gandhi, The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi (1930: Berkeley: Berkeley Hills Books, 2000), 37.}



\end{quote}


Roughly two years before the beginning of the U.S.
Civil War, the abolitionist John Brown raided a federal
armory in Virginia, in the hopes of provoking the violent
destruction of slavery. His raid failed and he was hanged.


A small segment of the Northern population saw him as
a martyr. Most called him insane. Southerners almost
unanimously declared him a terrorist. And Insane. The
Richmond Whig, in a typical statement, declared that “the
murderous old traitor and murderer belongs to the gallows,
and the gallows will have its own.”\footnote{The Richmond Whig, November 10, 1859.}


In the time between John Brown’s arrest and execution,
Henry David Thoreau delivered a lecture entitled “A Plea For
Captain John Brown” in Concord, Massachusetts. Usually the
town bell would ring when a lecture was about to begin, but
Thoreau’s topic was so controversial that no one was willing
to ring it. So Thoreau rang it himself. Upon returning to
the lectern, he said it was John Brown’s “peculiar doctrine
that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the
slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him.”\footnote{Henry David Thoreau, “A Plea For Captain John Brown,” October 1859.}


John Brown was very violent. Praise for him may sound
strange coming from the same Thoreau who helped inspire
Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. to utilize
nonviolent civil disobedience in their struggles—the same
Thoreau of whom King writes, “During my student days I
read Henry David Thoreau’s ‘On Civil Disobedience’ for the
first time. Here, in this courageous New Englander’s refusal
to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support
a war that would spread slavery’s territory into Mexico,
I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent
resistance.”\footnote{Martin Luther King, Jr. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2001), 14.} And Gandhi states that “Thoreau was a great
writer, philosopher, poet, and withal a most practical man,
that is, he taught nothing he was not prepared to practice
in himself. He was one of the greatest and most moral men
America has produced.”\footnote{Mohandas Gandhi, “For Passive Resisters,” Indian Opinion, October 26, 1907.}


Rather than pay a tax to support an imperialist war to
expand slave territory, Thoreau went to jail. He was only
there one night, but the essay he wrote about it, “On Civil
Disobedience,” had a monumental impact. In it, he writes,



\begin{quote}


“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or
shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we
have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?”\footnote{Henry David Thoreau, “On Civil Disobedience,” 1849.} Like
Thoreau refusing to pay his tax, King and Gandhi disobeyed
bad laws. Both did so nonviolently. The one time we know
Thoreau performed civil disobedience, it was nonviolent, yet
in “A Plea For Captain John Brown,” he writes, “I do not wish
to kill or be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which
both these things would be by me unavoidable.”\footnote{Thoreau, “A Plea For Captain Brown.”}



\end{quote}


King and Gandhi, and Gandhi in particular, took the
nonviolent part of nonviolent resistance pretty seriously.


Shortly before the Second World War, Gandhi wrote an
open letter to Nazi Germany’s Jewish citizens. “If there ever
could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity,
a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution
of a whole race, would be justified. But I do not believe in
any war.”\footnote{Mohandas Gandhi, “The Jews,” Harijan, November 26, 1938.} So what would he do instead? “If I were a Jew and
were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I
would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile
German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in
the dungeon.”\footnote{Ibid.}


As Saul Alinsky writes in Rules for Radicals, “Gandhi’s
passive resistance would never have had a chance against
a totalitarian state such as that of the Nazis. It is dubious
whether under those circumstances the idea of passive
resistance would even have occurred to Gandhi.”\footnote{Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971: New York, Vantage, 1989), 41.} In
totalitarian states, members of the opposition have a strange
tendency to disappear in the middle of the night. Getting
arrested or shot to call attention to injustice is not going to be
a particularly effective tactic.


So Gandhi’s advice seems pretty terrible. But does it seem
terrible because we know from history just how ruthless
Germany’s genocidal war machine was? Or do we simply
feel that violence is justified when someone seeks to destroy
us? If someone tries to kill you, you probably feel warranted
fighting back. And if I am standing nearby and can prevent
your death, you probably won’t mind if I use whatever level
of violence proves necessary to save you. Similarly, if some
government or group of people seeks to exterminate you and
everyone else of your race or religion, violent self-defense
seems reasonable. And if I had an army and could prevent
your genocide, you might not mind if we did what armies
do. So most of us are willing to accept violence in cases of
legitimate self-defense.

\section{Just What Is Self-Defense?}


But once we accept violence for self-defense, things get
quite complicated. When is something so threatening that
violence becomes admissible? When are we fighting for our
lives, and when are we just fighting? Most of history’s truly
heinous acts were performed in the name of self-defense. No
one goes around thinking, “I’m an unjust aggressor.” Rather,
we assume we are on the side of right and good, and then
rationalize our violent actions by expanding “self-defense” to
cover whatever we have done or are about to do.


During the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolshevik
Party found itself embroiled in a brutal civil war. Communism,
which they aimed to create, would generate wealth rationally
and distribute it equally. But poverty was becoming universal
instead. They had promised peace, land, and bread, but
this was proving difficult. They figured a new world could
still result from the revolution, but if they failed, the future
would be as bleak as the past. You see, they were defending
humanity.


So Leon Trotsky, the People’s Commissar of War, used the
Bolshevik’s Red Army to destroy rival parties and consolidate
power. The Bolsheviks were the vanguard of the revolution,
after all. To maintain discipline in his ranks, he executed his
own retreating troops.\footnote{Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879–1921 (1954: New York: Verso, 2003), 349.} Then, as the civil war wound down,
work became compulsory and “deserters from labor” were
sent to concentration camps.\footnote{Ibid., 417.} And in March 1921, sailors
at Kronstadt, whom Trotsky had previously called
“the
pride and glory of the revolution,” demanded the rights and
freedoms the Bolsheviks had promised. So Trotsky took his
troops and massacred the sailors.\footnote{Ibid., 428.}


Of course, all that violence never produced a free and
equal society, but one of history’s most brutal and repressive
regimes. That regime, the Soviet Union, not only survived the
civil war, but spent much of the twentieth century spreading
its system across the globe, largely through violence, and
largely in the name of creating Utopia. But Utopia never
arrived. Just more bloodshed and repression.


There were inevitable clashes and proxy wars between
the Soviet Union and the United States, which was
simultaneously spreading its system across the globe, also
largely through violence, but in the name of bringing free-
market capitalism to every nation on Earth. By obstructing
Communist advances, they too were defending humanity.


This also tended to create bloodshed and repression.


To take just one example, in September 1970, Salvador
Allende of Chile became the first Marxist elected president
anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. Pepsi-Cola and
ITT, two U.S. corporations operating in Chile, mentioned
to Richard Nixon that they were worried what an Allende
presidency would mean for them. Ascendant socialism
endangered capitalism. So Nixon and his Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger used the CIA to orchestrate Allende’s
overthrow. On September 11, 1973, Augusto Pinochet, with
the U.S. Government’s funding and assistance, staged a
military coup. Salvador Allende was shot in his office. But he
was hardly the only person murdered. Two sports stadiums
were turned into camps for interrogation, torture, and
execution. And atrocities continued throughout the nearly
two decades of Pinochet’s rule. Tousands of Chileans were
murdered by their own government. And all of this was set
in motion to keep the free-market free by keeping a legally
elected Marxist out of office. But communism is dangerous,
and the market is good, so all that death was justified. You
see, it was self-defense.


Since it is very easy to tell ourselves we are acting in
self-defense when we are actually the aggressors, we need
to be careful just what we call self-defense. Humans have
successfully rationalized terrible acts in its name. Caution is
required.

\section{Defending Ourselves}


And caution is required because the planet and its inhabitants
are under attack, and we need to determine what we can do.


As Rebecca Solnit points out, climate change is inherently
violent. Businesses and governments that “continue to profit
off the rapid, violent, and intentional destruction of the Earth”
are committing “extreme, horrific, longterm, widespread
violence.”\footnote{Rebecca Solnit, “Call climate change what it is: violence,” The Guardian, April 7, 2014.} Or as Adrian Parr stated in an interview with the
New York Times, “The human species is the agent of a terrible
injustice being perpetrated against other species, future
generations, ecosystems, and our fellow human beings.”\footnote{Natasha Lennard and Adrian Parr, “Our Crime Against the Planet, and Ourselves,” The New York Times, May 18, 2016.}


There are already crop failures and droughts, heat waves
that kill thousands, undrinkable water, and acidified oceans
where shellfish can no longer form shells. In India, heatstroke
deaths have increased by 61\% in the last decade.\footnote{Chaitanya Mallapur, “61\% Rise In Heat-Stroke Deaths Over Decade,” India Spend, May 27, 2015.} The heat
there can be so intense that just going outdoors can mean
death.\footnote{Nida Najar and Hari Kumar, “Pray for Shade: Heat Wave Sets a Record in India,” The New York Times, May 20, 2016.} And the subsequent drought is so extreme that
suicides among farmers have risen dramatically.\footnote{Ian Johnston, “Farmer Suicides Soar in India as Deadly Heatwave Hits 51 Degrees Celsius,” The Independent, May 20, 2016.} And
that’s just India. In Africa, droughts and water shortages
due to rapid changes in climate have already placed more
than 31 million people at risk of death from starvation and
malnutrition.\footnote{John Vidal, “Across Africa, The Worst Food Crisis Since 1985 looms for 50 Million,” The Guardian, May 22, 2016.} One person starving to death is a tragedy.
31 million is a tragedy of such magnitude that it’s almost
impossible to comprehend. We can no longer talk about a
looming environmental crisis. The crisis has begun. The Earth
and its inhabitants are under attack. But by whom? All of us?
Some of us? If it’s all of us, then maybe we should get together
and stop doing what we’re doing.


Of course, it’s not that simple. There is not some
undifferentiated and abstracted “humanity” destroying the
world. It is those who profit most from the “rapid, violent,
and intentional destruction of the Earth” who bear the most
responsibility. The world’s poor, whose lives and livelihoods
these profiteers destroy, should not share equally in the
blame. The poor should be defended. The profiteers should
be stopped. We should not blame “humanity,” but a specific
segment of humans. So if the Earth is under violent attack by
certain humans, can we feel justified if we fight back? This
planet sustains us and we have nowhere else to go.


Just imagine if the source of all this destruction were a
more obvious enemy. Imagine a malevolent alien race just
landed, started removing and destroying our resources,
killing the oceans, causing an unprecedented rate of species
extinction, pouring pollutants into rivers, cutting the tops
off mountains, and warming our atmosphere to dangerous
levels. If that were the case, any human who didn’t take
up arms to defend our common home would be branded
a coward. But because other humans perform precisely
that same list of atrocities upon our planet, the path to
stopping that destruction is much less clear. The strict lines
of demarcation between “us” and “them” that would exist if
those malevolent aliens had landed are hazy. So we can’t just
take up arms and start shooting. The enemy is everywhere.


The enemy is not only within our societies, but ofen runs
them. The army and police are employees of the polluters.


So how do we proceed?

\section{Singing Songs and Carrying Signs}


It has proven rather difficult to stop environmental
degradation by passing laws. For example, hydraulic
fracturing, or fracking, involves pumping wastewater into
subterranean rocks to release fossil fuels. Artificially induced
earthquakes are among the many environmental dangers
fracking produces. Natural and artificial earthquakes differ in
several respects, allowing researchers to quantify the instance
of each. Induced earthquakes occur at shallower average
depths, causing greater ground-shaking, and more ofen
occur in swarms. In Oklahoma, where fracking has been on
the rise, an average of 1.5 earthquakes with a magnitude of
3.0 or greater occurred annually between 1950 and 2005.


Between 2005 and 2015, a period that coincides with the
introduction of increased fracking to the area, that number
jumped to several hundred per year, “many of which are
thought to be related to wastewater injection.”\footnote{Mark Petersen et al, “2016 One-Year Seismic Hazard Forecast for the Central and Eastern United States from Induced and Natural Earthquakes,” (2016: U.S. Geologic Survey), 14.}


Fracking is terribly dangerous and damaging to the Earth.
So in November 2014, nearly 60\% of Denton, Texas voted to
ban fracking within city limits. Lawsuits against the decision
were filed within hours, and state representative Drew Darby
introduced House Bill 40, which is designed to take oil and
gas extraction out of municipal hands. It declares that:



\begin{quote}


A municipality or other political subdivision may not enact or
enforce an ordinance or other measure, or an amendment or
revision of an existing ordinance or other measure, that bans,
limits, or otherwise regulates an oil and gas operation within
its boundaries or extraterritorial jurisdiction.\footnote{\href{http://www.legis.state.tx.us/billlookup/text./}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.legis.state.tx.us\Slash{}BillLookup\Slash{}Text.aspx?LegSess=84R\&Bill=HB40}}



\end{quote}


Under HB40, which was passed into law, the State of
Texas, rather than the cities in question, can say what oil
and gas companies may do. Furthermore, all decisions
need to be “commercially reasonable”—“a condition that
permits a reasonably prudent operator to fully, effectively,
and economically exploit, develop, produce, process, and
transport oil and gas.”\footnote{Ibid.} Similarly, in May 2016, the Colorado
State Supreme Court declared a series of municipal fracking
bans invalid, while also using the court’s written opinion to
block any future efforts to ban fracking anywhere else in the
state.\footnote{Michael Wines, “Colorado Court Strikes Down Local Bans on Fracking,” The New York Times, May 2, 2016.} One of the decisions declares that any fracking ban
is unacceptable, as it “materially impedes the effectuation
of the state’s interest in the efficient and responsible
development of oil and gas resources.”\footnote{“City of Fort Collins vs. Colorado Oil and Gas Association,” \href{http://www.courts.state.co.us./}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.courts.state.co.us.} May 2, 2016.} These are all clear
moves to take power away from those fracking harms the
most while keeping it in the hands of those doing the harm
and reaping the profits.


In a much more violent example, Berta Cáceres—a
Honduran indigenous rights activist, environmentalist, and
one of the main members of the opposition to the regime
running Honduras at the time of her death—was murdered
in her home in 2016. She had spent years fighting the
construction of the Agua Zarca Dam, an environmentally
destructive project that not only uses land belonging to the
Lenca people, but jeopardizes their access to water. According
to international law, they should have been consulted. But
that never happened.


Many assume that Cáceres’ death was a political
execution. Her nephew stated that “Everyone is saying that
the government or the company did it, but you’ll never
know. It’s the art of obfuscation.”\footnote{Elisabeth Malkin and Alberto Arce, “Berta Cáceres, Indigenous Activist, Is Killed in Honduras,” The New York Times, March 3, 2016.} The government her
nephew sees as a chief suspect arose from a 2009 coup that
forcibly deposed President Manuel Zelaya. Almost every
nation in the Organization of American Sates pushed for
his return and for elections not run by the de facto coup
regime. But U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton helped
prevent his return, in order to “render the question of
Zelaya moot,”\footnote{Hillary Clinton, Hard Choices (New York: Simon \& Schuster, 2014), 266.} a statement she makes in the hardcover
edition of her book, Hard Choices, that was subsequently
removed from the paperback, along with everything else
pertaining to the Honduran coup. (An email sent by the
U.S. Ambassador to Honduras in the immediate afermath
of the coup had informed Clinton that “there is no doubt
that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress
conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and
unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch.”\footnote{Ambassador Hugo Llorens, “TFHO1: OPEN AND SHUT: THE CASE OF THE HONDURAN COUP,” July 24, 2009, Wikileaks.} She
later rewrote history in an attempt to defend her actions,
stating that “the legislature in Honduras and the national
judiciary actually followed the law in removing President
Zeleya.”\footnote{“Hear Hillary Clinton Defend Her Role in Honduras Coup When Questioned by Juan González,” Democracy Now, April 13, 2016.}) Elections were held, but every organization
monitoring them refused to stay. Every organization, that
is, except the U.S. Republican Party. The coup regime, to no
one’s surprise, won. Violence and repression rose, and Berta
Cáceres was eventually murdered in her home for opposing
a dam being built illegally.


“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or
shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we
have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?”\footnote{Thoreau, “On Civil Disobedience.”} In all
these cases, making and amending laws failed. You can fight
for laws banning fracking, but those laws will be overturned.


You can pass laws protecting indigenous people and their
land, but those laws will be ignored. You can protest, but
depending where you live, that might get you killed. And
representatives of the most powerful government on
Earth will lie and rewrite history, just to make sure that
transnational capital can do whatever it pleases. Passing
laws in defense of the Earth has either become impossible,
or when possible, pointless.


So is nonviolent civil disobedience still a viable answer?


Or has this, like laws protecting the environment, become
something industrial capitalists and the politicians that
support them have learned to accept and ignore? As Derrick
Jensen writes in Endgame, there are many protests in which



\begin{quote}


Protest organizers provide police with estimates of the numbers
of people who have volunteered to be arrested (so police can
schedule the right number of paddy wagons), and also provide
police with potential arrestee’s IDs so the process of arrest will
be smooth and easy on everyone involved. It’s a great system,
guaranteed to make all parties feel good. The police feel good
because they’ve kept the barbarians from the gates, the activists
feel good because they’ve made a stand—I got arrested for what
I believe in—and those in power feel good because nothing
much has changed.\footnote{Derrick Jensen, Endgame: Volume I: The Problem of Civilization (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), 81.}



\end{quote}


And since nothing much has changed, the existing system
remains in place, and the violence against the Earth and
the world’s poor continues. A game is played and nothing is
accomplished.


Nonviolent civil disobedience certainly seems less
effective now than it did during the Civil Rights Movement.


In Direct Action: An Ethnography, David Graeber writes:



\begin{quote}


Fifty years ago, during the Civil Rights Movement, there
was a brief moment in American history where Gandhian
tactics worked: the violence lying behind racial segregation
was laid bare across America in terrifying images of racist
sheriffs with police dogs. Perhaps this was a very particular
set of circumstances: for instance, the fact that so many
northern reporters saw the South as an alien country anyway.
Or perhaps in the intervening half-century something has
changed about the American media. Whatever the reason,
this feat has not been repeated; largely, it would seem, because
those making the editorial decisions feel their ultimate
loyalties are to the very larger structure of power Gandhian
strategies mean to expose.\footnote{David Graeber, Direct Action: An Anthology (Oakland: AK Press, 2009), 456–7.}



\end{quote}


Furthermore, as Nicholas Mirzoeff stated in an interview,
“Today, if police dogs attack demonstrators, it is no longer
national news. Ironically, the example of King himself, so
often vilified as a traitor and a Communist in his lifetime,
is used to berate today’s protesters with the demand for
nonviolence, meaning compliance with police instructions.


King never intended nonviolence to mean compliance with
the state.”\footnote{Natasha Lennard and Nicholas Mirzoeff, “What Protest Looks Like,” The New York Times, August 3, 2016.} The state determines who may occupy a public
space and what they may do there. And the state has given
itself the sole right to utilize force. Only the police can bring
dogs or weapons to protests. When anyone else does, it’s a
downright abomination. Violence must always come from
above. When it comes from below, our outrage is expected.


Just how we can make our actions effective is not obvious.


As Daniel McGowan, who was convicted of terrorism for
performing two arsons with the Earth Liberation Front,
states in the documentary If A Tree Falls: A Story of the
Earth Liberation Front:



\begin{quote}


The situation with the environment is not getting better, it’s
getting worse. And I’m not saying the path of destruction or
destroying everything is the right path. But I didn’t know
what to do. It’s like when you’re screaming at the top of
your lungs and no one hears you, like, what the hell are you
supposed to say?\footnote{If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, directed by Marshall Curry (2011, Oscilloscope), DVD.}



\end{quote}


The planet that sustains us is in grave danger. But getting
much of anyone to recognize this very simple and frightening
fact is proving quite difficult. Laws are ignored. Protests are
theatre. Sabotage and violence discredit.

\section{Fighting Back}


But one thing is certain. We can no longer wait patiently
while nation-states spend decades debating non-binding
environmental agreements that accomplish nothing. It is
increasingly obvious that increasingly intense and disruptive
actions are required. That’s easy enough to say. But this
seemingly simple statement raises some complex ethical
issues. What is permissible in defense of the Earth? Elsewhere,
I have quoted Naomi Klein’s statement that “Mass uprisings
of people—along the lines of the abolition movement and
the Civil Rights Movement—represent the likeliest source of
‘friction’ to slow down an economic machine that is careening
out of control.”\footnote{Klein, “Can Climate Change Unite the Left?”} She makes this claim and fails to elaborate.


When I quoted it, I also failed to elaborate. But this statement
requires elaboration. Within both the abolition movement
and the Civil Rights Movement, the choice between violence
and nonviolence was incredibly contentious. William Lloyd
Garrison and John Brown, Martin Luther King, Jr. and
the Black Panthers, all adopted widely divergent tactics in
pursuit of many of the same goals. If there is going to be a
mass movement in defense of the Earth, and there absolutely
needs to be, similar controversies will certainly arise. We
cannot ignore them.


The arguments for getting belligerent are compelling. If the
contemporary ruling classes are among the most destructive
people in the history of the planet, and have deemed just
about anything permissible in pursuit of their aims, why
should we act in collusion with their police forces to act out
almost entirely ineffectual forms of protest? Why should we
push for legislation that will be ignored or repealed? How can
we become actual agents of social change, rather than players
of a rigged game?


In recent decades, more confrontational tactics for
defending the environment were utilized by Earth First!, co-
founded by Dave Foreman and three others in 1980. Foreman
had worked for the Wilderness Society and the Nature
Conservancy, but became disillusioned when he saw that
such mainstream environmental organizations could only
achieve token gestures and symbolic successes. As he wrote
in 1982, “The Forest Service is Louisiana-Pacific’s. Interior is
Exxon’s. The Environmental Protection Agency is Dow’s.”\footnote{Dave Foreman, “Earth First!,” Earth First!, February 1982.}


Earth First! declared extralegal tactics necessary in defense
of wilderness. One of their earliest newsletters states that
“Lobbying, lawsuits, magazines, press releases, outings, and
research papers are fine. But they are not enough. EARTH
FIRST will use them, but we will also use demonstrations,
confrontations, and more creative tactics and rhetoric.”\footnote{Dave Foreman et al, eds., Earth First, November 1980.}


Those actions were, and are, largely nonviolent, although
one of their slogans, “No compromise in defense of Mother
Earth,” seems to imply an acceptance of whatever proves
necessary. They popularized tree-spiking, which involves
hiding large nails, or “spikes,” in trees. These spikes can
destroy equipment and injure whoever hits one with a
chainsaw. But lumber companies are usually informed once
the spikes are in place, and the trees are usually spared.


Although there have been injuries, it is most ofen only a
potentially violent act. Beyond tree-spiking, there were other
acts of sabotage and attempted sabotage. In 1989, Foreman
and three others were arrested for intent to damage power
lines leading to the Rock Flats nuclear weapons facility
in Colorado.\footnote{“4 Accused of Sabotage Plot,” The New York Times, June 1, 1989.} Can we accept sabotage, especially when it
obstructs the destruction of the planet that sustains us? Is
that legitimate self-defense?


In a book about the dangers of suburban sprawl, Oliver
Gillham writes about another group and another bit of
sabotage.



\begin{quote}


One of the most extreme expressions of anti-sprawl sentiment
occurred in December 2000, when the Earth Liberation Front
(an ecoterrorist group) went so far as to set fire to several
houses being built in a new subdivision in Suffolk County,
New York. Spray painted messages on the houses read “Stop
Urban Sprawl” and “If You Build It We Will Burn It.” While no
one on either side of the sprawl debate condones such violent
action, the incident does demonstrate how inflammatory the
subject has become.\footnote{Oliver Gillham, The Limitless City: A Primer on the Urban Sprawl Debate (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002), xv.}



\end{quote}


It seems mistaken to both make that “inflammatory” pun,
and to say that “no one on either side of the sprawl debate
condones such violent action.” The ELF placed themselves
so emphatically in the debate that someone writing a book
on the subject would feel the need to mention them in
the introduction. In fact, it seems important to ask: can
we countenance the destruction of unsold and unfinished
houses whose construction destroys our planet? Is that
kind of arson legitimate self-defense? If developers’ idea
of “development” is destroying every remaining inch of
the natural world, shouldn’t we stop them? Is arson an
acceptable answer?


In the over 1,200 actions attributed to the Earth Liberation
Front and the Animal Liberation Front, no one has ever been
killed or injured. Yet those who have been caught are ofen
tried as terrorists. As Bill Barton of the Native Forest Council
states in If A Tree Falls:



\begin{quote}


The industry tends to call the environmentalists “radical.” The
reality is that 95\% of the standing native forests in the United
States have been cut down. It’s not radical to try and save the
last 5\%. What’s radical is logging 95\%.\footnote{If A Tree Falls, Marshall Curry.}



\end{quote}


The people behind oil spills and other environmental disasters
get fines. The people who try to stop them get prison time.


Something is very wrong with this.


In the early 1980s, about a decade before the formation
of the ELF, a Canadian group called Direct Action bombed
a power plant substation on Vancouver Island and a factory
in Toronto where guidance systems for cruise missiles were
produced. The power plant Direct Action bombed was being
built in an area that didn’t really need it. The whole project
had been approved without community oversight, and it was
rumored that the plant’s real purpose was to sell excess energy
to the United States, which ended up looking like the truth
once it was up, running, and sending much of its power to
California. Direct Action bombed the plant while it was still
under construction—after the most expensive equipment was
in place, but before it was providing power. This was meant
to hurt the project financially, but not alienate the public with
a blackout. No one was injured, and the project was delayed.


If no one was hurt, was this action violent? Is destruction
justified if it aims to stop even greater destruction? Is violence
just one thing, or are there many types, differentiated by
target, intent, and severity? Or, to quote the Dalai Lama,
perhaps “the distinction between violence and non-violence
lies less in the nature of the action and more in the motivation
with which it is done.”\footnote{Dalai Lama, Twitter Post, April 1, 2016, 2:30 a.m., \href{https://twitter./}{https:\Slash{}\Slash{}twitter.} com\Slash{}DalaiLama.}


Compared to that first action, the subsequent bombing
of the weapons plant in Toronto went much less smoothly.


Direct Action parked a van filled with explosives next to one
of the buildings and called in a warning. But the timer went
off early, the building had not been vacated, and although
no one died, many were severely injured. Juliet Belmas, who
made the phone call, later stated that “to this day I believe
it was a miracle no one was killed, we should never have
attacked a civilian target (a place where people worked) with
550 pounds of dynamite; it was wacko crazy.”\footnote{“Militant Feminism: An Explosive Interview With a KKKanadian Urban Guerrilla,” Earth First!, March 2010.} Watching
the afermath on television, and seeing paramedics carrying
people out on stretchers, Ann Hansen, another member of
Direct Action responsible for the bombing, writes that she
felt “the inescapable guilt of having seriously injured innocent
people.”\footnote{Ann Hansen, Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla (Oakland: AK Press, 2002), 273.} She considered suicide.


In her memoirs, Hansen’s main accomplice in the bombing,
Brent Taylor, states,



\begin{quote}


“If people are building weapons of
destruction to maintain their wealth and power, I see nothing
wrong with destroying those weapons.”\footnote{Ibid., 147.} So is obstructing the
construction of weapons capable of destroying all life on Earth
self-defense? Or had Direct Action, like Nixon and Trotsky,
used the notion of self-defense to defend the indefensible?
Maybe they had taken it too far? In an interview with prisontv.
net, Taylor stated, “We always took it a little farther, sort of to a
Unabomber level, really.”\footnote{\href{http://www.prisontv.net/blog-about-prison-issues-crime-/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.prisontv.net\Slash{}blog-about-prison-issues-crime-and-punishment\Slash{}8\Slash{}2011-Feb-05\Slash{}squamish-5-and-the-litton-bombing}}



\end{quote}

\section{Acting in Isolation}


The Unabomber is the name the United States Federal
Bureau of Investigation gave Ted Kaczynski as they sought
to determine his identity and arrest him for killing three
people and injuring 23 others with homemade bombs over
the course of 17 years. Kaczynski was a mathematics prodigy,
who was admitted to Harvard at 16 and earned his doctorate
from the University of Michigan at 24. He taught at the
University of California, Berkeley for two years, but abruptly
resigned, moving to a cabin in Montana, where he hoped to
live off the land. But “developers” were destroying the land.


As he stated in an interview:



\begin{quote}


The best place, to me, was the largest remnant of this plateau
that dates from the tertiary age. It’s kind of rolling country, not
flat, and when you get to the edge of it you find these ravines
that cut very steeply in to cliff-like drop-offs and there was
even a waterfall there. It was about a two days hike from my
cabin. That was the best spot until the summer of 1983. That
summer there were too many people around my cabin so I
decided I needed some peace. I went back to the plateau and
when I got there I found they had put a road right through
the middle of it. You just can’t imagine how upset I was. It was
from that point on I decided that, rather than trying to acquire
further wilderness skills, I would work on getting back at the
system. Revenge.\footnote{See, \href{http://primitivism.com/kaczynski.htm}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}primitivism.com\Slash{}kaczynski.htm}}



\end{quote}


He initially performed small acts of sabotage on those nearby
developments, but soon started mailing bombs to university
professors and airlines in a rather misguided attempt to
destroy the entire system that had made so much destruction
possible.


In 1995, Kaczynski promised to stop his bombings if a
major newspaper or magazine would publish his manifesto,
“Industrial Society and Its Future.” The New York Times and
The Washington Post both did. His brother recognized the
prose and ideas, the FBI had its first real lead, and Kaczynski
was soon arrested.


Although the preservation of wilderness was his main
concern, his manifesto rarely addresses it. Writing in the first
person plural, either to hide his numbers, or perhaps as a tacit
admission that a lone murderer is easily dismissed as insane
while groups are worth taking seriously, he writes, “Since
there are well-developed environmental and wilderness
movements, we have written very little about environmental
degradation or the destruction of wild nature, even though
we consider these to be highly important.”\footnote{Theodore Kaczynski, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” 1995, paragraph 5.} Instead, he lashes
out at “lefism,” “technology,” “political correctness,” and
“oversocialization.”


For Kaczynski,
“oversocialization” involves total
adaptation to the existing social order and its values. And
although becoming a productive member of a society
dedicated to demolishing the Earth is certainly something
to avoid, Kaczynski’s violent, antisocial response is not
the right one. Humans are social creatures. We live, work,
and develop together. Social transformations come from
collective endeavors. The best way to replace our dominant
paradigm is to create and inhabit institutions that actually
embody freedom, justice, and environmentally harmonious
modes of being. This requires movements, which require
groups of people. Of course, these will ofen be small. Truly
radical change is rarely popular at the outset. Abolitionists
constituted a very small, marginalized group. Yet slavery
was still evil. Real social change, maybe without exception,
starts small. But as groups become smaller, amoral measures
become more likely. Kaczynski acted alone. Direct Action
had five members and acted in isolation. Cut off from wider
social movements, ethical oversight can disappear. Small may
be beautiful, but too small can be a real problem.


In If A Tree Falls, activist and filmmaker Tim Lewis
discusses the collapse of the environmental movement in
Eugene, Oregon in the wake of the ELF arsons:



\begin{quote}


I think people were self-righteous, I think people thought they
had the answer, weren’t willing to listen to other points of view,
because their view was more radical than that point of view. All
of that came into play, I think, to help narrow the amount of
people that were connected within the movement to the point
where it just went—poof—doesn’t exist anymore.\footnote{If A Tree Falls, Marshall Curry.}



\end{quote}


In addition, groups and individuals utilizing more violent
methods cannot collaborate with those acting in open
opposition. On simple, tactical grounds, legal and extralegal
groups cannot know what one another are up to. Those who
need secrecy will blow their cover, while those acting in the
open will be discredited by association. Extralegal activity
almost unavoidably entails isolation. And once stripped of
the social, ethics can become irrelevant.


In a letter to Earth First!, Kaczynski writes, “Concerning
EF!, my suggestion is that the real revolutionaries among
them should withdraw from the existing EF! movement,
which would exclude mere reformers, liberals, leftists, etc.
who are afraid of ‘alienating the middle class.’”\footnote{Earth First!, May 1999.} Given the
histories of previous movements, this seems somewhat
logical. Small bands of inspired minorities tend to have the
greatest impact. But if the “real revolutionaries” take on
everyone else, then everyone else becomes the enemy, and
anything becomes possible.

\section{Acting Together}


Since none of us can dismantle our existing systems on our
own, to change our social order, we must remain social. But
this is not to say that larger groups, like nations or armies
or mobs, have not marched off and committed any heinous
acts. That’s pretty much what “history” is. War afer war afer
genocide. Large groups are not somehow more moral than
individuals. The opposite is usually the case. But if we wish
to mount any political resistance against the existing order,
acting alone is almost always going to be a bad idea. But
working together can go pretty poorly too.


In Stanley Milgram’s controversial experiments at Yale
University, two subjects, a “teacher” and a “learner,” were led
into a room. The “learner” was strapped to a chair, and an
electrode was placed on one wrist. The “teacher” was told the
experiment was meant to measure the effects of punishment
on learning. Then the “teacher” quizzed the “learner” on
a series of word pairs. Every time an error was made, the
“teacher” administered an increasing level of shock.


Except the “learner” was an actor, the electrode was a
prop, and the real object of the experiment was how much
pain the average person would inflict just because a scientist
at a prestigious university told them to.



\begin{quote}


At 75 volts, the “learner” grunts. At 120 volts he complains
verbally; at 150 he demands to be released from the
experiment. His protests continue as the shocks escalate,
growing increasingly vehement and emotional. At 285 volts,
his response can only be described as an agonizing scream.\footnote{Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper \& Row, 1974), 4.}



\end{quote}


At each point, the scientist urges the “teacher” to continue.


The assumption that only a sadistic fringe would shock the
“learner” at the most extreme level would make roughly two-
thirds of humanity part of that sadistic fringe. Which is not
exactly a “fringe.” And since people are so easily led to bad
behavior, the ways we act together, and what we demand of
each other, are incredibly important.

\section{What Is To Be Done?}


There may be no universally appropriate tactics for
undermining our existing systems. Time, place, context, and
endless experimentation will determine what is to be done.


In totalitarian states, volunteering to get arrested as a form
of protest isn’t actually protest, but suicide. So the more
oppressive the state, the more likely it is that opposition to
it will be a militia with guns and not a nonprofit with picket
signs. But in a more open society, immediately adopting
violent tactics can discredit entire movements.


Right now, it is necessary to stand in the way of those
who would destroy the planet to maintain power and profit.


Tactics will vary by location and political climate. But in every
case, this needs to be both a social movement and an ethical
movement. Actions enacted in anger and isolation, as well
as actions enacted by larger groups, can all be problematic.


No path is perfect. Means and methods will always shif. We
should never get stuck in patterns or stop analyzing what we
do, and should always be wary of the voice that urges us to
continue with an act we may regret.


Whether we are prepared or not, we are entering a
new epoch. Taking some sort of action will soon become
unavoidable. Fossil fuels, which power global capitalism’s
destruction of the Earth, are going to disappear or become
too expensive to extract profitably. By some accounts, we
have already passed peak oil. Cars, trucks, airplanes, global
shipping, plastics, and many other now-ubiquitous facts
of life will become relics of an unrecoverable past. We can
always return to the Stone Age, but the Oil Age is only going
to happen once. And it’s almost over. Without fossil fuels,
industrial capitalism will become impossible. Will it be a sad
ending for everyone but the insects, or a transition to a better
future? The current status quo is already doomed. Their
doom will be our demise if we don’t hasten their downfall.


But how do we do that? What is permissible?


We ought to recognize that humans are more easily
moved to extreme actions than we are usually willing
to admit. Robespierre didn’t need to do all that much to
produce his terror. A few impassioned speeches, and the
lines for the guillotine stretched around the block. As our
situation grows increasingly dire, just what methods we can
adopt needs to be clear. If there is to be a mass movement that
confronts and disrupts the entrenched powers destroying
our planet, there will certainly be debates about tactics. We
don’t necessarily need definitive answers in place before we
begin. After all, it’s already past time to act. But we need to
be ready to apply constant vigilance to those actions. We
need to get organized. But we need to make intelligent and
effective organizations. We have to get it right this time. It
might be our last chance.

\chapter{The Revolution Will Be Hilarious}



\begin{quote}


 \emph{I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas.}


\emph{I’m frightened of the old ones.}


John Cage\footnote{Cage quoted in Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012).}



\end{quote}


The acts of thinking comedically and behaving
democratically share enough analogous elements that
an extended comparison between the two makes each much
clearer. In particular, comedy can help elucidate the type of
thinking it will take to create and maintain a free and democratic
society, generate new ideas, and foster broad social movements.


The ideas presented here should be useful to anyone. My
intended audience is not simply comedians or even fans of
comedy. It is not even written for funny people. Just people.


Wherever they might be.


As will be shown, comedy can teach us a great deal
about the type of thinking it will take to create a better
world. Just as jokes require understanding and utilizing
concealed connections for comedic effect, free societies
require comprehending, tolerating, and putting those
same connections to use. A mind that only perceives one
correct mode of being is both inherently undemocratic and
invariably humorless. In order to make jokes or communicate
effectively with people outside one’s immediate circle, one
must have knowledge of, and an ability to move between,
various modes of speaking and being. If we wish to positively
transform our world, we will need to work with a wide
variety of people, even those who seem incredibly different
from ourselves. Barriers need to be broken. And the type of
thinking modeled by comedy can help.


A rigid insistence on a single viewpoint can block the
more expansive perspective that both jokes and free societies
require. Greek, Shakespearian, and other classical tragedies
have repeatedly attempted to teach us the dangers of hubristic
myopia, yet we refuse to learn. As the poet Frank Bidart said
of King Lear in an interview:



\begin{quote}


King Lear, when he’s in power, can’t see a damn thing.
Everybody sucks up to him, and when people don’t suck up to
him—when Cordelia doesn’t suck up to him—he can’t stand
it. It’s very hard to see anything when you’re on top. People
who can see how things are really ordered—they’re perhaps
always a little outside it, or started as its victim; they can see the
grinding beneath what may appear a smooth surface.\footnote{Andrew Rathman, Danielle Allen and Frank Bidart, “An Interview with Frank Bidart,”Chicago Review 47, no. 3 (2001), 26.}



\end{quote}


In King Lear, the Fool criticizes the King when no one else
is able. After the elderly Lear banishes Cordelia, the only
daughter he should have trusted, and divides his kingdom
between the other two, he finds himself a disempowered
figurehead. No one but the Fool is willing or able to call the
King foolish. When he does, Lear is stunned by the Fool’s
bluntness. Lear asks, “Does thou call me a fool, boy?” The
Fool responds, “All thy other titles thou hast given away; that
thou wast born with.”\footnote{William Shakespeare, King Lear. (1608: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 131–32.}


But we are not necessarily doomed to the type of
foolishness Lear commits and the Fool criticizes. A comedic
mindset can help us move from self-centered to multi-
centered worldviews, can increase our understanding and
tolerance for one another, and can teach us to develop and
accept the widest possible range of non-harmful behaviors.


Comedy can increase our sensitivity to the plights and pains of
unfamiliar people, make it ever more difficult to marginalize
and persecute other human beings, and allow us all to work
together more effectively. A little more “foolishness” could
make us all a lot wiser.


In addition, and as will be shown in more detail later,
comedy is the purest example of how human creativity works.


When two seemingly unrelated planes of thought are shown
to intersect at an unforeseen point, the result could just as
easily be laughter as insight. Comedic thinking can generate
new ideas or even complete paradigm shifs with just a few
well-chosen words. We can play various modes of being off
one another, generating new ideas like a comedian creates
punch lines—finding unforeseen points of intersection
between seemingly unrelated things.

\section{A Few Important Rejoinders}

\subsection{1. Wait, what do we mean by “democracy”?}


Before we move into our actual discussion about comedy,
democracy, and the creation of a free society, there are a few
caveats to cover. First, it seems important to mention that the
“democracy” alluded to throughout this essay is much more
than just acting as “constituents” within a representative
framework. The democracy this essay champions is not the
democracy we currently have, but the democracy of as-yet-
non-existent political arrangements that will facilitate ever-
greater freedom, and will actually respect the diversity of
human needs, experiences, and abilities.


Truly free institutions are peopled institutions, in which
unique individuals share common ground on a person-to-
person basis. There is no state, law, proclamation, or decree
that could grant us this type of democracy. It can only be
collectively constructed through arduous political processes
and difficult dialogues. We can put the process in motion, but
the end result will emerge and evolve in unexpected ways—
like a good joke on its way to the punchline.


Democracy was not established once and for all in the
late
1700s. It is an ongoing experiment under continual
development. Utopia is a moving target. Perhaps surprisingly,
some would disagree. In the United States, there exists a segment
of the judiciary referred to as “strict constructionists.” Most
often associated with the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin
Scalia, strict constructionists espouse total fidelity to the original
intended meanings of constitutions and laws, in his case, the U.S.
Constitution. In a way, strict constructionists seek to freeze our
political practices at the moment they were imagined.
But throughout history, this rigid stance has been
questioned by more progressive politicians. Most famously,
in the midst of the U.S. Civil War, Abraham Lincoln delivered
his
“Gettysburg Address.” Compromises written into the
U.S. Constitution, such as making legal determinations as
to what fraction of a human being a slave should count—
not to mention even allowing slavery in the first place—had
resulted in the sectional strife that led to the Civil War. With
his “Gettysburg Address,” claims Garry Wills:



\begin{quote}


[Lincoln] performed one of the most daring acts of open-
air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting.
Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or
her intellectual pocket picked. The crowd departed with a new
thing in its ideological luggage, that new constitution Lincoln
had substituted for the one they brought with them.\footnote{Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg (New York: Touchstone, 1992), 38.}



\end{quote}


Lincoln “altered the document from within, by appeal from
its letter to its spirit, subtly changing the recalcitrant stuff of
that legal compromise, bringing it to its own indictment.”\footnote{Ibid.}


And he did so in a mere 272 words.


In the “Gettysburg Address,” Lincoln declares that the
United States had been founded on the notion that “all men
are created equal”—here actually harkening back to the
Declaration of Independence rather than the Constitution
itself. He then goes on to state that the living must carry on the
“unfinished work” of those being buried at Gettysburg, and
see to it that the nation shall have a “new birth of freedom.”


Lincoln recognized that democracy is an ongoing
experiment. Slavish dedication to dated documents will do
us little good. We must always be prepared, like Lincoln, to
rethink our political practices. And just as Lincoln saw in the
1860s that the political practices of the 1770s needed revising,
we too can forge ahead into further births of freedom by
continually developing the unfinished work of democracy.


As Walt Whitman (in a way, the patron saint of these pages)
wrote of democracy in 1871:



\begin{quote}


It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten,
because that history has yet to be enacted.\footnote{Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (1871: Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2002), 40.}



\end{quote}


And although over a century has passed since Whitman wrote
these words, true democracy does not yet exist. And it may be
many more centuries in the making. But working toward its
realization is among the most important tasks we face.

\subsection{2. Wait, what’s a “revolution” and why should it be “hilarious”?}


Here’s our second rejoinder. Although this essay is entitled
“The Revolution Will Be Hilarious,” just what a “revolution”
can be, and who might be a revolutionary, should be
clarified. The somewhat clichéd image of the bomb-wielding
revolutionary with a furrowed brow is not the image of
someone who thinks much of anything is “hilarious.” To this
person, the revolution is most definitely a sober and unsmiling
affair. But any new social order worth inhabiting will be built
on increased joy and happiness. The revolution will be full
of laughs and smiles or we should not bother having it at all.
Or, to quote a popular misquotation of Emma Goldman, “If I
can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.”\footnote{This is Emma Goldman’s most famous remark, despite the fact that it seems she never said (or wrote) it. This popular misquotation is rumored to have derived from an attempt to fit the following passage from Living My Life on a t-shirt: “At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” See Emma Goldman, Living My Life vol. 1 (1931: New York: Dover, 1970), 56. In its full glory, rather than pithy paraphrase, this passage manages to depict the sober seriousness of most “revolutionaries.” But it’s nice the other way too, and fits much better on a t-shirt.}


Even our most serious problems (or especially our most
serious problems) can best be solved by implementing the
attitude of openness humor makes possible. An insistence on
seriousness and solemnity almost always serves pretension
and pomposity, and narrows the wider perspective that
comedy and free societies require. It always seems to be those
whose authority is the most arbitrary and absurd who insist
on being surrounded by seriousness. They fear a joke may
puncture the aura of importance they have created. Distrust
anyone who distrusts laughter.


In addition, relinquishing our self-serious pomposity can,
perhaps surprisingly, facilitate truly serious work. As Vaclav
Havel stated:



\begin{quote}


If you don’t want to dissolve in your own seriousness to the
point where you become ridiculous to everyone, you must
have a healthy awareness of your own human ridiculousness
and nothingness. As a matter of fact, the more serious what
you are doing is, the more important it becomes not to lose this
awareness. If you lose this, your own actions—paradoxically—
lose their seriousness. A human action becomes genuinely
important when it springs from the soil of a clear sighted
awareness of the temporality and ephemerality of everything
human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness
into an action.\footnote{Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvíždala (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 113.}



\end{quote}


Moreover, our imagined revolutionary with all the bombs is
not only acting out of self-serious anger, but perhaps angry
isolation as well. Closed cells of revolutionaries publishing
pamphlets to one another in their own special jargon are in
a poor position to produce truly broad and effective change.


We need movements that continuously grow. This will require
removing the barriers between our small, isolated worlds, so
we can get together and work together. Comedic thinking
is essential for this task. The revolution will certainly be
hilarious. Otherwise, it will be a total joke.

\subsection{3. Wait, aren’t jokes cruel sometimes?}


And this brings us to our final rejoinder. Although the
psychology of comedic thought is essentially the same as the
psychology of democratic thought, humor, in its application,
can be used positively or negatively. Comedic thinking may
be quite similar to democratic thinking, but comedy is not
inherently democratic. Insults, mean-spirited mockery,
misogynistic and racist humor can all reinforce many
narrow-minded notions and make others feel less welcome.


Jokes are ofen directed at someone, and are commonly used
to exert or gain power in a social hierarchy.


But comedy can just as easily make others feel less alone,
whether by helping us see one another from new perspectives,
or helping us laugh at the absurdities of our common plight.


There is humor that unifies and humor that tears apart. There
is humor that exposes hypocrisy and humor that mocks the
marginalized. Humor is not always a force for progress. It
matters how we use it.


As Garry Trudeau writes in “The Abuse of Satire”:



\begin{quote}


Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy
against the powerful. Great French satirists like Molière and
Daumier always punched up, holding up the self-satisfied
to ridicule. Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never
funny—it’s just mean.\footnote{Garry Trudeau, “The Abuse of Satire,” The Atlantic, April 11, 2015.}



\end{quote}


Trudeau made these remarks in reaction to the January 2015
mass shooting at the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie
Hebdo in Paris. The magazine had angered a large swath
of the Islamic world by publishing cartoons depicting the
prophet Muhammad. Or that’s the popular narrative. But a
quick perusal of the issues of Charlie Hebdo from the months
preceding the attack show far fewer instances of actual
religious satire in comparison to mean-spirited caricatures
of Muslim immigrants. For the most part, Charlie Hebdo
punched down, and mocked the already marginalized.


Although this mass shooting was (obviously) horrific, Charlie
Hebdo is not exactly the noblest use of free speech. Just
because you’re a martyr doesn’t mean you were right. And
just because your jokes are pissing people off, that doesn’t
necessarily mean you’re pushing hard truths or something.


Je ne suis pas Charlie.


While Charlie Hebdo definitely punched downward,
antisemitism, which also isn’t funny, is based on a perceived
upward punch. Since Jews are rumored to run the banks, the
media, and Hollywood, it is assumed that they secretly run
the world. These sorts of conspiracies have roots older than
movies or any currently bankable currency—contemporary
antisemitism is just new seeds sprouting from the same old
shit. So antisemetic punches aren’t actually aimed up or
down. They’re more like punches thrown by a blind guy on
LSD trying to hit his hallucinations. It would almost be sad if
it didn’t cause so much harm.


Satire and other kinds of comedy are best when they
attack the citadels of power. When the powerless are attacked,
or when punches are thrown randomly based on erroneous
information, jokes can be destructive and awful. Luckily,
it’s not really the practice of comedy, but the psychology of
comedy with which this essay is concerned. But because we
will need to at least periodically touch on the practice of
comedy, for the sake of clarity, I will call comedy that mocks
the pompous and encourages creative thinking and increased
understanding progressive humor, and comedy that attacks
the marginalized or reinforces stereotypes and ossified
thinking regressive humor.


Alright, we’re ready to discuss how comedy works.

\section{So Here’s How Comedy Works}


In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler analyzes creativity,
and demonstrates that the same principles of creation
apply for everyone from the Jester, to the Scientist and the
Sage.\footnote{See Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: Macmillan,} He claims that his book “proposes a theory of the act
of creation—of the conscious and unconscious processes
underlying scientific discovery, artistic originality, and comic
inspiration. It endeavors to show that all creative activities
have a basic pattern in common, and to outline that pattern.”\footnote{Ibid., 21.}


He begins with humor, and shows that it is the bisociation
of two seemingly separate planes of thought or matrices of
action at an unexpected point that makes jokes (and other
“eureka!” moments) work. As Koestler states, “I have coined
the term ‘bisociation’ in order to make a distinction between
the routine skills of thinking on a single ‘plane,’ as it were,
and the creative act, which, as I shall try to show, always
operates on more than one plane.”\footnote{Ibid., 35–36.} Bisociative acts, found
most obviously in humor, are present in all acts of creation.


How does bisociation function? Not much makes a joke
unfunny quite like explaining it, but here are some examples
and explanations anyway.



\begin{quote}


A ham sandwich walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Hey, we
don’t serve food here!”



\end{quote}


In this joke, two senses of the word “serve” are played off one
another.


Then there’s this:



\begin{quote}


Q: What’s the difference between space pirates and clinical
depression?


A: I don’t battle space pirates every day!



\end{quote}


Or here’s one from Groucho Marx:



\begin{quote}


One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in
my pajamas I’ll never know.



\end{quote}


Each of these jokes works when an unexpected point of
connection is created between two seemingly distinct ideas—
what Koestler would call a “bisociation.”


What is going on in these moments of bisociation? In
his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein—a
notoriously humorless man who once claimed that a very
good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely
of jokes—discusses our perception of indefinite drawings like
this duck-rabbit:


At one moment, we may perceive this picture as a duck, but a
moment later, see it as a rabbit. What happens in these instants
when the duck becomes a rabbit or the rabbit becomes a
duck? The picture does not change, but our perception of
it does. And our perception shifts in a very similar manner
when “in my pajamas” becomes “in my pajamas.”


So that’s “bisociation.” And although it is a useful term,
it requires some expansion. The binary logic of bisociation
oversimplifies the true complexities of many jokes and other
creative thoughts.


“Multisociation” is preferable. Moshé
Feldenkrais argued that any actual choice requires more than
two options. Rather than going back and forth between just
this or that, a third option (or more) introduces a higher
level of nuance, and truly choosing becomes a possibility.


Similarly, both rich experiences and funny jokes usually
operate on more than two levels. Increased elements yield
increased nuance, which yields increased usefulness.


We can clarify and expand on multisociation by bringing
in the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin’s related notions of
“heteroglossia” and the
“hybrid construction,” although
he, like Koestler, usually writes of binaries between just
two elements. Heteroglossia, as defined by Bakhtin, is the
coexistence of various sub-vocabularies within a single
linguistic code. Heteroglossia is all about the importance of
context over text. Every utterance any human ever makes
bears the mark of a time, place, social class, generation, or
ideology. Language cannot be neutral.


Heteroglossia comes into comedy in
“hybrid
constructions.” These occur in passages and utterances
that employ a single speaker, but multiple vocabularies
simultaneously. As Bakhtin states:



\begin{quote}


What we are calling a hybrid construction is an utterance that
belongs, by its grammatical (syntactic) and compositional
markers, to a single speaker, but that actually contains mixed
within it two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two
“languages,” two semantic and axiological belief systems. We
repeat, there is no formal—compositional and syntactic—
boundary between these utterances, styles, languages, belief
systems; the division of voices and languages takes place
within the limits of a single syntactic whole, ofen within the
limits of a simple sentence.\footnote{Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 304–5.}



\end{quote}


In other words, a single word or statement can be a duck,
a rabbit, or just some lines on paper, depending on how
we look at it. Or, to combine Koestler and Bakhtin, it is the
multisociation of multiple non-neutral linguistic codes that
yields hybrid constructions—and comedy. In humor, two
or more self-consistent and seemingly incompatible planes
of thought intersect at an unforeseen point. Effective punch
lines are logical, but unexpected.

\section{What’s So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding?}


Humor and creativity require the ability to see the world
from multiple perspectives—a skill equally important in
behaving democratically. In order to either make jokes or
communicate effectively with people outside one’s immediate
circle, one must have an understanding of, and an ability to
move between, various modes of speaking and being. Jokes
require understanding and utilizing difference for comedic
effect. Democracies require understanding, coexisting, and
cooperating with that same difference. (And although we
should never cease attempting to understand others, we
should also recognize that others will always remain others.
Actual experience is nontransferable.)


In order to effectively explore the corollaries between
comedy and democracy, we will need to do some hopefully
not too confusing hopping between the related issues of self-
perception, other-perception, stereotypes, outsider-hood,
and language. I am going to try to keep it all concise and
organized, but sadly, we have officially reached the part of
this essay where the complexities of the world slam into the
attempted tidiness of the printed page and make maintaining
clarity increasingly difficult. So keep rooting for me and we’ll
get through this together.


On his WTF Podcast, Marc Maron interviews various
comedians about their lives, their craf, and the social
functions of funniness. In episode 224 of the WTF Podcast,
Maron interviewed the black comedian and actor Chris
Rock, who discussed pitching sketch ideas to the white
writers at Saturday Night Live. White comedians, he argued,
had a distinct advantage.



\begin{quote}


Because they share a culture—they have kinda the same moms,
kinda the same dads, they grew up in the same environment—
there’s a shorthand that happens. They get the little things
about you that make you funny. And when you’re the black
guy, no one gets the little things. They just get the hits.\footnote{Marc Maron and Chris Rock, “WTF Podcast,” Episode 224, November 3, 2011 (Available at \href{http://www.wtfpod.com/}{www.wtfpod.com})}



\end{quote}


The details of black culture escaped Saturday Night Live’s white
writers. It made them miss the nuances of Rock’s jokes—the sorts
of subtleties they would be able to perceive in white comedians.


This does not make them racist. It simply means that the details
of black culture were not part of their mental makeup.


The process for better comprehending Rock’s jokes and
the process for rendering him less of an “other” are basically
the same. Learning why someone is funny happens through
learning why that someone is also a fellow, suffering human
being. The path to tolerance and the path to laughter are
identical. Discovering the details of an unfamiliar someone’s
plight and pain will reveal the reasons for their laughter. And
make it harder to add to their pain.


Comedy requires the simultaneous use of various
vocabularies. We don’t just need to understand the nuances
of various cultures, we need to do something interesting
with those nuances. Here’s an example: Comedy Central
named Richard Pryor the greatest stand-up comedian of
all time. Besides his obvious skills as a comedian and his
ability to present his immense personal pain and suffering
honestly and universally, the perspective he had as a
member of a marginalized minority in the United States who
simultaneously operated within the context of mainstream
culture gave him a unique frame of reference, allowing him
to play black and white culture off one another in interesting
and unexpected ways. Someone who exists solely as a member
of a single culture is less likely to see that culture from the
outside and realize what’s so funny about it. Its practices are
likely to remain unquestioned, while those of other cultures
will seem strange or unnatural. The smooth surface is visible,
but not the grinding beneath it.


Pryor’s simultaneous existence in two cultures gave him
distance on both, making him particularly demonstrative
of W.E.B. Dubois’ notion of African American double
consciousness—a split caused by living the American
experience with an African heritage. Pryor’s dual cultural
consciousness, coupled with his ability to find funny
connections between these cultures, contributed immensely
to his success.


Although Pryor pointed out difference, his work was not
divisive. Instead, he emphasized the common humanity that
transcends difference. As he states,



\begin{quote}


My comedy was colorblind. None of it would’ve worked if the
world was all one color. I mean, even black ain’t beautiful if it’s
the only color you look at every day. Life’s richness, its beauty
and excitement, comes from the diversity of things.\footnote{Ibid., 176.}



\end{quote}


Why play up difference to be divisive? “We’re all people, you
know? That’s hard enough.”\footnote{Ibid., 154.}


Even when skilled comedians are not members of
minority groups, they still tend to be marginalized outsiders.


The beautiful and popular kids rarely grow up to be
professional comedians. Or even funny for that matter. And
this is most likely due to the lack of an outside perspective
that comes from one’s easy acceptance into a dominant
culture. In episode 163 of the WTF Podcast, Maron spoke
with the late-night talk-show host Conan O’Brien. O’Brien,
after discussing his nerdy, awkward childhood, stated,



\begin{quote}


I’m always suspicious if I think a comedian’s too good looking,
and they were a great athlete when they were young. I almost
can’t believe that they’re going to be any good. [\dots{}] I’ll have
some really good looking intern on the show, who tells me that
he’s also a great athlete or something, and he’ll say, “Yeah, I’m
thinking of going into stand-up.” And I just want to say, “No,
no, no. This is for us. This is our consolation prize.”\footnote{Marc Maron and Conan O’Brien, “WTF Podcast,” Episode 163, April 4, 2011 (Available at \href{http://www.wtfpod.com/}{www.wtfpod.com})}



\end{quote}


Ostracized outcasts usually create the best comedy. They
spend most of their lives seeing the world from the outside,
viewing it from a perspective that those wrapped comfortably
in its machinations cannot. It is impossible to comment
on a system one cannot even perceive as a system, that one
simply perceives as “reality.” But when a dominant culture
makes you an “other,” it becomes possible to see it for what
it actually is—just another historically contingent culture in
the shifing tapestry of time. We all need to step outside the
machinations of our ingrained patterns of thought and action
and see where our various self-consistent (or inconsistent)
modes of being do (or don’t) intersect, so that we can be more
tolerant, less cruel, and increasingly democratic.

\section{On Funny Women}


Of course, the long-standing lack of women comedians
complicates my argument about outside perspectives and the
creation of comedy. The notion that existing as an outsider
within a dominant culture gives one an advantage in being
funny should make women comedians incredibly common.


This finally seems to be changing, or at least starting to
change, but women comedians remain both rare and
distinctly women comedians.


Perhaps surprisingly, “Why aren’t women funny?” is an
even older question than the people who usually pose it. In
an essay entitled “Why Aren’t Women Funny?,” Christopher
Hitchens attempts to explain this startlingly common
sentiment. Although he sets out to prove that there is
something inherently unfunny about women, his evidence
and his thesis never quite come together. By failing, his
essay inadvertently uncovers some interesting points. What
he actually demonstrates is not that women are somehow
congenitally less funny than men, but that many men are
threatened by funny women, creating an unspoken social
practice wherein most women keep their jokes to themselves
in the company of other genders.


Because humor requires exceptional intelligence and the
ability to stay ahead of an audience, a woman who is funnier
than a man also seems smarter. This can be threatening to
many men. They do, afer all, believe it’s their world. James
Brown told them so. As Hitchens writes, “Precisely because
humor is a sign of intelligence (and many women believe, or
were taught by their mothers, that they become threatening
to men if they appear too bright), it could be that in some way
men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an
audience, not as rivals.”\footnote{Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (Twelve: New York, 2011), 392.}


But beyond the subtle social practices that make it difficult
for women to be funny around men, the standard stereotypes
and stock characters that comprise much of comedy’s
(and the world’s) content typically come from a very male
perspective. As the female cartoonist Betty Swords—who
began publishing her cartoons in the mid-1950s—said of the
depiction of women in most comics:



\begin{quote}


Women were dumb about money, dumb about driving, dumb
about anything that happened in the real world. And that
began my trip into feminism. I began to see how humor treated
women. Dumb, dumb, dumb.\footnote{R.C. Harvey, “At Swords’ Point: Humor as Weapon,” The Comics Journal, December 19, 2011.}



\end{quote}


In other words, women usually are the joke, not the makers
of jokes. In his essay “Feminism and Pragmatism,” Richard
Rorty states that “most oppressors have had the wit to teach
the oppressed a language in which the oppressed will sound
crazy—even to themselves—if they describe themselves as
oppressed.”\footnote{Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge}


Progressive humor can make us see things in new ways,
while regressive humor can make us see things in the same
over-simplified ways again and again. We need to expand the
depth and breadth of materials we use. In her book Humor
Power, Swords states:



\begin{quote}


The male images of women created by cartoonists were
accepted as the truth about women. For example: The woman
driver is the safest driver, according to the National Safety
Council—but not to the National Cartoonists Society. To
them, she’s the quintessential “dumb driver,” an idea so set
in the concrete of comic tradition that it’s become humor
shorthand: when we see a cartoon of a woman driver, we know
automatically that she’s a dumb driver. Just ask a man which
he believes, the Cartoonists Society or the Safety Council?\footnote{Swords quoted in Harvey, “At Swords’ Point,” Betty Swords’ Humor Power remains an unpublished manuscript.}



\end{quote}


Humor can reinforce ugly and regressive stereotypes or it can
subvert them. So we don’t just need to tell funnier jokes. We
also need to pay attention to the sorts of jokes we tell. We
need progressive, not regressive humor.


It’s worth pointing out that there are interesting examples of
women who attacked standard misogynistic stereotypes with
a form of comedic jujitsu—using the weight of our culture’s
asinine assumptions to topple those very assumptions—and
achieved mass cultural success in the process. On I Love Lucy,
still one of the funniest shows in the history of television,
Lucille Ball played “Lucy Ricardo,” a ditzy housewife who—
as cultural expectations would dictate—kept her real age and
hair color a secret, and was (of course) terrible with money.


By performing as what we expected to see, Ball was able to
play with our expectations. She overplayed Lucy Ricardo’s
stereotyped characteristics to such an extent that she revealed
them to be the hollow absurdities they are. So although
stereotypes typically fuel reactionary thinking, they can
sometimes be used to undercut themselves.


However useful and interesting such cultural practicesmay
be, simply exposing sexist suppositions is just a preliminary
step in the liberation of women. A society’s dominant
voices determine that society’s terms of engagement, and
female perspectives have been marginalized. As Simone
de Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex, woman currently
“knows and chooses herself not as she exists for herself but
as man defines her.”\footnote{Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 2011 [1949]), 156.} Women’s (and other dominated or
marginalized groups’) languages, vocabularies, and modes
of being are ofen prevented from fully developing. To quote
Beauvoir again,



\begin{quote}


Woman is not a fixed reality but a becoming; she has to be
compared with man in her becoming; that is, her possibilities
have to be defined: what skews the issues so much is that she
is being reduced to what she was, to what she is today, while
the question concerns her capacities; the fact is that her
capacities manifest themselves clearly only when they have
been realized.\footnote{Ibid., 45–46.}



\end{quote}


The realization of a still-nascent truth can counter a dominant
truth, give us new ways to interact, and new jokes to tell.


The creation and de-marginalization of a truly feminine
vocabulary is needed for women to have a real voice—comic
or otherwise—in society. A dominated culture does not have
the freedom to be itself. So in a weird sort of way, “woman” is
not yet the name of an actualized entity. Only when the yoke
of cultural dominance has been sloughed off once and for all
can “woman” become the name of a being with a distinct and
recognizable vocabulary—a vocabulary defined by what it is,
rather than what it is not.

\section{Hysterical Contingencies and Comedic Vistas}


Obviously, based on much of what has been said above,
understanding language is essential for understanding
democracy. Jokes regularly require subtle
(and-not-so-
subtle) manipulations of language and
vocabularies,
while democracies require the ability to understand and
communicate effectively with “others.”


In his essay
“Authority and American Usage,” David
Foster Wallace points out that a child who can only speak
“correct” English is



\begin{quote}


actually in the same dialectical position as the class’s “slow”
kid who can’t learn to stop using ain’t and bringed. Exactly
the same position. One is punished in class, the other on the
playground, but both are deficient in the same linguistic skill—
viz., the ability to move between various dialects and levels of
“correctness,” the ability to communicate one way with peers
and another way with teachers and another with families and
another with T-ball coaches and so on.\footnote{David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Back Bay Books, 2006), 104.}



\end{quote}


Or, as Mikhail Bakhtin states a little less informally in
“Discourse in the Novel,”



\begin{quote}


Consciousness finds itself inevitably facing the necessity
of having to choose a language. With each literary-verbal
performance, consciousness must actively orient itself amidst
heteroglossia, it must move in and occupy a position for itself
within it, it chooses, in other words, a “language.”\footnote{Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 295}



\end{quote}


Behaving democratically and making jokes ofen require the
ability to simultaneously utilize several systems of discourse.


If one doesn’t understand the differences in communication
styles between peers, parents, and T-ball coaches, one will
not be able to crack jokes about or between these groups. Nor
will one be able to comfortably coexist with them. Comedy,
democracy, and language are all closely related.


Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom you may remember from the
duck-rabbit drawing, managed to revolutionize the philosophy
of language not just once, but twice in the twentieth century.


And when he did it the second time, he was definitely on to
something. The first time Wittgenstein revolutionized the
philosophy of language, he worked within the parameters set
by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. Like these thinkers,
the young Wittgenstein sought foundations for language and
mathematics. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only
philosophical work he published in his lifetime, analyzes
true\Slash{}false assertoric statements, and declares, among other
things, that only these types of statements have sense. A
statement that cannot be declared true or false is senseless,
and the subject should be passed over in silence.


But over the course of the next several decades,
Wittgenstein came to reject just about everything Frege,
Russell, and his younger self had said. Wittgenstein’s later
work entirely jettisons the notion that language and math
have foundations at all. Rather, he suggests, humans develop
various systems of rules, and then follow, ignore, or change
those rules. Meaning is determined by use. Our languages
and mathematical systems are not descriptions of reality, but
tools for navigating the world.


If we teach a child the name of an object, maybe a car or
a desk, and then say the name of that object to the child, who
in turn brings it to us, has the child learned a proposition that
can be true or false? No. The child has learned a system of
rules for a specific linguistic situation. This system of rules is
not made meaningful by the truth or falsity of its propositions,
but by the use to which it can be put. The way a vocabulary
operates in the world is what makes it meaningful.


Frege, Russell, and the young Wittgenstein all declared
logic to be language’s quasi-metaphysical foundation, and then
attempted to use logic to explain language. But logic is not an
explanation of language, just a re-description of it in different
terms. In fact, there are no meta-theories of language, just
accounts of the various ways languages are used.


Wittgenstein’s earlier work only analyzed text, but with his
later work, he came to accept (and emphasize) the incredible
importance of context. Meaning is not
“discovered” by
finding a language that corresponds to reality, but by creating
better tools for navigating the world. And just as we wouldn’t
argue whether a hammer or some other tool is “true” or
“corresponds to reality,” we should evaluate vocabularies by
their function and usefulness. Do they allow us to deal with
the world effectively? If they do, they are useful and worth
keeping. If not, we should abandon them.


The Western capitalist description of the world is a worn-
out tool that needs to be replaced. It describes the world as
one of endless competition, and encourages the current rage
for selfishness that, if left unchecked, will be our undoing.


The apostles of this worldview not only demand compliance
with their commands, but total adoption of their values. As
Tomas Merton writes of the young Gandhi:



\begin{quote}


He had to a great extent renounced the beliefs, the traditions,
the habits of thought, of India. He spoke, thought, and acted
like an Englishman, except of course that an Englishman
was precisely what he could never, by any miracle, become.
He was an alienated Asian whose sole function in life was
to be perfectly English without being English at all: to prove
the superiority of the West by betraying his own heritage
and his own self, thinking as a white man without ceasing
to be “a Nigger.”\footnote{Thomas Merton, “Gandhi and the One-Eyed Giant,” in Gandhi on Non-Violence, edited by Tomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1964), 3.}



\end{quote}


Compliance with capitalism is ofen made necessary for
survival. In South Africa in the late 1800s, the English faced
a labor shortage in the mines, mainly because the natives
preferred not to perform such miserable work, and stayed
on their farms instead. So in 1894, the English government
passed the Glen Grey Act, creating a labor tax that had to
be paid in shillings. And those shillings had to be earned.


Either work in the mines or go to jail. Most coercion into
the economic system is less overt than this, but it is no less
coercive.


The imperialist West adopted the hubristic attitude
that the non-European cultures that conquest crushed
had been stalled societies awaiting the blessings of
“civilization” and “free markets.” Victory appeared to bring
vindication. But with germ warfare, nuclear weapons, and
the total degradation of the planet through institutionalized
selfishness as the West’s most notable “achievements,” it
may be time to accept that many of the cultures that have
been destroyed and dispatched to the academic ghetto of
anthropology journals ofen offer more elegant social forms,
sensibilities, and ways of being.


In Detroit, Michigan, an African American artist named
Dabls has built an enormous outdoor installation entitled
“Iron Teaching Rocks How To Rust.” Old paint cans and
piles of rebar try to teach rocks and chunks of concrete
how to rust like them. It looks like a classroom—the iron
up front, the rocks lined up in chairs. The iron embodies
Western imperialist attempts to bring the glories of rapid
self-destruction to those who could actually sustain
themselves.


In the film Embrace of the Serpent, a shaman from a
nearly-vanished tribe in Colombia leads two separate
Western explorers on two separate trips to find one
medicinal plant. Antonio Bolívar Salvador plays the shaman
Karamakate, the last of his tribe. But the reality is not very
different from the fiction. Ninety percent of the indigenous


people of Colombia have been wiped out. The herbicide
glyphosate, applied liberally to coca crops, is causing
cancer and birth defects. Environmental degradation and
violent imperialism are making life impossible. As the film’s
director, Ciro Guerra, stated, “These are people who have
managed to live in the same place for 10,000 years without
overpopulating it, without polluting it, without destroying
its resources.”\footnote{Karl Mathiesen, “Embrace of the Serpent star: ‘My tribe is nearly extinct,’” The Guardian, June 8, 2016.} Then the lessons of just how to rust were
taught with all the force that could be brought to bear. Now
the classroom is a mess and the school is burning down.


The worldview this essay espouses is so different from the
currently dominant capitalist one that it is alarming. Free
societies require tolerance, understanding, cooperation,
and mutual aid—not the competitive, accumulative, and
commercial values encouraged by the market economy.


Without radical change—both personally and politically—
the only future we can look forward to is one of ever-
mounting credit card debt and oceans at a rolling boil. We
cannot go on wasting resources and destroying land. We
need to maintain what we have so that life on Earth can
continue.


At this point in history, it almost seems beyond debate
that our social, political, and economic systems are fueling
the destruction of our planet. The capitalist demand for
endless growth and ever-increasing consumption in a world
with finite resources is quite obviously suicidal. And the
governmental defense of this economic system—creating
laws that make capitalist economic practices ever more
official and entrenched—institutionalizes and perpetuates
our self-destructive greed.

\section{Comedy, Creativity, and the Shock of the New}


It is important that we synthesize, bisociate, and multisociate
all our assorted worldviews together to create new
vocabularies and new ideas. The old ideas have failed us,
but a comedic mindset can help us create new ones. As has
been mentioned, comedy is creativity in its purest form.


Comedy not only requires seeing from multiple perspectives,
but doing something clever with those perspectives. Punch
lines possess the same structure as both artistic creation
and scientific discovery. This is probably why Wittgenstein
thought a book of philosophy could be written consisting
entirely of jokes. Humor works through the multisociation
of seemingly separate planes at unforeseen points. A punch
line is only funny if it is surprising. If people “see it coming,”
the joke will fail.


This is why humor often ages poorly. As David Berman
writes in his collection of poems, Actual Air:



\begin{quote}


It seems our comedy dates the quickest.


If you laugh out loud at Shakespeare’s jokes,


I hope you won’t be insulted


if I say you’re trying too hard.


Even sketches from the original Saturday Night Live


seem slow witted and obvious now.\footnote{David Berman, Actual Air (New York: Open City Books, 1999), 58.}



\end{quote}


Once a new way of seeing has been introduced, the surprise
needed to generate laughter is gone. In both humor and
scientific discovery, two seemingly unrelated planes are found
to intersect at an unexpected point. And just as the Copernican
revolution has ceased to be mind-blowing, most older humor
now seems stilted and predictable. Comedy perpetually
requires new multisociations to stay surprising and funny.


Humor tends toward newness, just as our ideas should.


Moreover, just being exposed to comedy can increase our
creativity. The psychologist Alice M. Isen conducted a study
in which college students were given a book of matches, a
box of tacks, and a candle. They were then asked to affix the
candle to a corkboard in such a way that the candle would
burn without dripping wax on the floor. Students who were
shown a comedy film beforehand had a 75\% success rate.


Those who were shown a film about mathematics figured it
out 20\% of the time, while those who watched nothing had a
13\% success rate.\footnote{Alice M. Isen, “Positive Affect Facilitates Creative Problem Solving,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52, no. 6 (1987), 1123.}


Isen then conducted a supplementary experiment in
which an additional group were given candy bars before
attempting the challenge. Comedy still conquered all. As
Isen states, “Contrary to expectation, subjects in the gif
condition did not show improved performance as those in
the comedy-film condition did. Thus it may be specifically
humor, and not positive affect more generally, that gives rise
to improved creative problem solving.”\footnote{Ibid., 1128.} In short, comedy
can prepare our minds for creative thinking and seeing
things from fresh perspectives.


This makes etymological sense as well. The word “humor”
comes from the Latin umor, for bodily fluid, which entered
Old French (still meaning bodily fluid) as humor. In English,
the word retains implications of fluidity and the ability to
flow with changing circumstances, with the shif in meaning
from bodily fluids to jokes pivoting on the medieval and
Renaissance belief that shifing “humors” are responsible for
shifs in temperament.\footnote{And there aren’t many things funnier than bodily fluids.}

\section{Creating the Future}


Comedic thinking involves flowing and changing creatively
in relation to obstacles and encounters, and this fluidity of
being can help us create a better world. The future remains
unwritten. No template from the past can tell us what we
ought to do. We can look back and find inspiration, but what
we really need are new social forms and new individuals
of never-before-seen varieties. Our ossified and outmoded
forms need to be disassembled and reconfigured.


Although we cannot just will the unforeseen into
existence, we can create the circumstances where it
can emerge. If we guarantee collective, free inquiry, we
create the possibility for beliefs and worldviews to collide
and combine. There are no rules for this collision and
combination beyond simply guaranteeing that freedom.


Just as good punchlines are surprising, new ideas arise
from unforeseen combinations. Nothing new comes from
thinking old thoughts over and over again.


But, sadly enough, not everyone wants wide varieties
of worldviews inhabiting the same spaces. Jared Taylor, a
Yale-educated white supremacist who prefers being called a
“racial realist,” argues that monolithic cultures of single races
are more stable, and therefore preferable, to multicultural
societies, with Japan as his prime example. “Stability” may
sound good, but in Taylor’s case, “stability” is both a cover
for racism and the manifestation of an intense fear of change.


New ideas and new forms will not arise if separate cultures
separately maintain their separate ways. By wearing a suit
and hosting conferences, he and his followers present a
slightly more respectable version of racist thought than a
bunch of drunken skinheads, but the ideas motivating them
aren’t much different.


In January
2016, as Donald Trump launched his
campaign for the U.S. Presidency by demanding a wall along
the U.S.-Mexico border and threatening to ban Muslims
from entering the United States, Taylor helped make a pre-
recorded “robocall” urging the people of Iowa to support
Trump. He closed his statement by saying, “We don’t need
Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people who
will assimilate to our culture. Vote Trump.”\footnote{Allegra Kirkland, “White Nationalist PAC Blankets Iowa With Robocalls For Trump,” Talking Points Memo, January 9, 2016.} But we don’t
need assimilation. We need interpenetration.


It is only through total freedom of thought and the
acceptance of all non-harmful behaviors that we can
create the circumstances for a better world to emerge. Of
course, the sort of optimism that would believe a better
world is even possible has gone horribly out of style. The
future is not what it used to be. The Utopian visions of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given way to
dystopian dread. In the Middle Ages, the world was seen
as a temporary stopping place where humanity suffered
for a bit while awaiting final judgment. To the medieval
mind, perfection existed before the fall and would only
come again after the apocalypse. But following the
Enlightenment, and particularly for many nineteenth and
twentieth century artists and radicals, perfection became
an Earthly possibility.


Marxist and Modernist thought, as well as Utopian novels
like William Morris’ News from Nowhere, Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward, and Upton Sinclair’s The Millenium, all
exemplify the once-common belief in the possibility of a
better future. But as we made our way into a new millennium,
we forgot to bring such hopes with us. If the future is imagined
at all, it is almost invariably a bleak one, with films like Blade
Runner, Mad Max, Wall-E, and The Road exemplifying the
common notion that the future, if we have one, will not be
pretty. We are now lef with neither God nor Utopia—stalled
in place as we await our inevitable collapse.


We can no longer afford to do without Utopian thinking.


If we don’t dream big now, there won’t be anyone lef to dream
at all. To do so, we must first learn to embrace complexity,
rather than taking the easy path and mentally foisting a false
homogeneity onto an intricate and multifaceted world. A free
society functions when unique individuals share common
ground. The type of thinking exemplified by comedy is
exactly the type of thinking we need to master if we wish
to reimagine the future. Comedy can help us see how to
think and speak on multiple planes simultaneously, and
to multisociate and synthesize all our various worldviews
together to create new ideas and new vocabularies—which
we could then multisociate, on and on, into a future we
cannot yet imagine.


We should respect—and even revel in—our incredible
diversity of individual needs and skills, while still cooperating
and functioning as communities. In The Ecology of Freedom,
Murray Bookchin calls for an “ethics of complementarity.”


He points out that a self is “nourished by variety,” and
cannot thrive if it guards itself against “threatening, invasive
otherness.”\footnote{Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982), 366.} The freedom afforded by such an “equality of
unequals” would help us respect—and even revel in—our
incredible diversity of needs and skills.


In the first paragraph of Democratic Vistas, Walt
Whitman claims that what is needed for true liberty is first,
“a large variety of character,” and second, “full play for human
nature to expand itself in numberless and even conflicting
directions.”\footnote{Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 1, emphasis added.} I italicized “conflicting” for a reason. Whitman
is demanding much more than diversity through preservation
and protection. It seems essential to emphasize that this
essay is not a call for the kind, gentle acceptance of every
imaginable idea. Truth may be historically contingent, and
our vocabularies may “merely” be tools, but there are better
and worse ways to describe the world. Some vocabularies
are actually quite harmful, and, as has been pointed out, the
currently dominant one is particularly so.


But this “conflict” between worldviews does not need to
involve bashing heads to beat new ideas into them. Rather,
we can create and actualize better ways of being that will
turn our world based on greed into another embarrassing
relic of the past. Writing and whining about it like this is not
enough. We shouldn’t be content to simply complain that the
capitalist class is raping and pillaging our planet. Why should
we expect them to stop if we can’t present something better?


The problem isn’t so much their success as it is our failure.


In order to supplant what is, we will need new vocabularies,
and the type of thinking modeled by comedy can help. An act
of quasi-comedic multisociation can produce an idea or object
that has no place in the world. By introducing something
that doesn’t belong within our existing systems, moments of
multisociative insight can disrupt the machinations of the
given and expand the scope of the possible. There is a war of
vocabularies to be waged, and for now, the capitalist notion
of life as a quest for profit has set our terms of engagement.


But these terms can be called into question in radical and
fundamental ways.


It may be difficult, but we can multisociatively recreate the
spaces we inhabit, whether they are physical, mental, literary,
or even dream space. Like our languages, our methods of
dissecting, dividing, and dealing with reality are just tools
for navigating the world. We can reinvent any of them.


Actually, we must reinvent them. Nothing less than the future
of humanity is incumbent on these acts of multisociative re-
creation. Upon undertaking this task, we will find ourselves
confronted with problems like creation and resistance in
the face of subtle and often hidden forces of social control.


Distancing ourselves from what is and moving toward what
could be will require numerous acts of creation, incalculable
acts of will, and the determined rejection of habit.


Space and time are necessary categories, but the shape they
take is ultimately our own creation. Every social structure—
past, present, and future—is a historically contingent artifice.


The political and economic structures we inhabit, the divisions
between spaces for work, leisure, privacy, and socializing, as
well as the modes and methods available for moving between
these spaces, determine the apparent limits of the possible.


And the time we perceive is determined by the ways we
navigate these constructed spaces. Schools, jobs, prisons,
asylums, and hospitals all mold us to the machinations of
capitalism. They are all part of a single system—a system set
to the rhythms of the marketplace, which in turn sets us to
the rhythms of the marketplace.


Capitalism forces humans to act as players in the game
of commerce. What business wants, business gets. And what
business wants are citizens whose survival is dependent on
successfully playing the capitalist game—to be marketable
beings who appeal to employers. We have been shaped by
and for this reality. Freeing ourselves from it will not be easy.

\section{How to Begin?}


As should be obvious by now, comedy can help. We can
create quasi-comedic fissures in the given by multisociating
what is with what could be, using punch line-like moments of
insight to punch holes in the present. We need to destroy all
our archetypes, stereotypes, and other ossified symbols. They
are not engaged with creatively—they just sit there, waiting
to be understood. Or they are used in the same predictable
ways, again and again. Their meaning already exists. They
are almost always part of the given we should refuse to take.


(Not coincidentally, stereotypes and archetypes typically
constitute the content of the most hackneyed and predictable
humor.) Truly creative multisociations, on the other hand,
evoke something new.


Moments of quasi-comedic creativity can offer ruptures
in reality where something truly unique and unforeseen can
enter. When we comprehend where two self-consistent and
apparently incompatible planes do in fact intersect, we help
reshape our world.


Not everything that’s funny is necessarily a joke. We need
to wage, and win, a war of vocabularies.


In Humor Power, Betty Swords states:



\begin{quote}


If humor has the power to shape society—and given that our
society is one of growing violence and alienation—can we not
alter and improve society, at least our corner of it, by changing
our humor? Only when we recognize humor’s power—for
good as well as evil—can we control that power for positive
purposes in both our personal and professional lives.\footnote{Swords quoted in Harvey, “At Swords’ Point.”}



\end{quote}


Comedy can reinforce old ideas or it can create new ones.


The lessons of comedy are powerful and useful. We just need
to take the right lessons and use them in the right ways.


As funny as it may sound, if we take the lessons of comedy
seriously, our species may have a shot at survival.


The revolution will be hilarious.


Seriously.


92

\chapter{Buy the Land and Buy the Light}


In 1603, Johann Bayer introduced one of the oldest star naming
systems still in use. In Bayer’s system, the visibly brightest
star in each constellation is named Alpha, the second Beta, and
so on through the Greek alphabet, giving us names like Alpha
Centauri and Beta Centauri. There are other systems, such as
the Henry Draper Catalog, which identifies over 300,000 stars
by number. For instance, Alpha Centauri is known there as HD
125823. Betelgeuse, or Alpha Orionis, is HD 39801.


Like Betelgeuse and Alpha Centauri, many stars
have multiple names. And although the International
Astronomical Union recognizes most star names, even they
have their limits. Their website states, “The IAU frequently
receives requests from individuals who want to buy stars or
name stars after other persons. Some commercial enterprises
purport to offer such services for a fee. However, such ‘names’
have no formal or official validity whatsoever.”\footnote{See \href{http://www.iau.org/public/themes/buying\_star\_names/}{www.iau.org\Slash{}public\Slash{}themes\Slash{}buying\_star\_names\Slash{}}}


The most well-known of the star-selling enterprises that so
irks the International Astronomical Union is the International
Star Registry. Founded in 1979, the Star Registry allows people
to pay to name a star whatever they want. In addition to a star
name, customers also receive a parchment certificate and a
map with coordinates. It’s quite the deal.


The Star Registry’s website admits that “International
Star Registry star naming is not recognized by the scientific
community.”\footnote{See \href{http://www.starregistry.com/}{www.starregistry.com}} But the thing is, stars don’t care what we call
them. They don’t recognize the Star Registry or the scientific
community. There’s a star in the Andromeda Constellation
we could either call HD 10307 or Margaret Thatcher. It was
burning back when our most advanced ancestors were single-
celled organisms. It will still be burning when cockroaches
inherit the Earth. And it is very, very far away. We are entirely
irrelevant to this star. Beyond the bounds of Earth, neither
name has any more validity than the other.


So my problem is not that the people at the International Star
Registry think they can, like the International Astronomical
Union, name stars. Of course they can name stars. They do
it all the time. What bothers me is that they can make a
successful business out of it. A world where purchasing points
of light makes perfect sense, and where the International
Astronomical Union
“frequently receives requests from
individuals who want to buy stars,” is a world with its goals
and values wildly misaligned. Now may be the only moment
in human history when selling stars would sound anything
but absurd. But what has changed? How could a business,
inconceivable in any other era, survive for decades?


To answer that, we need to pivot from purchasing stars to
purchasing land. Given what follows, using the Star Registry
as a set-up may seem unfair. New notions of ownership that
emerged in the last few centuries made the International
Star Registry possible. These notions were instated through
destruction and genocide, and were then used to justify
further destruction and genocide. But however unfair it
may seem, it was a chance encounter with the Star Registry’s
website that led to the rest of this research. And that initial
question remains interesting. Just what happened to make
such a business even possible?


The development of exclusive private property provided
the context in which the Star Registry could come into
being. Exclusive private property is a surprisingly recent
phenomenon that emerged as Europeans, particularly the
English, colonized North America. The practices that emerged
as they divided and sold an entire continent—empty except
for all the people living on it—ushered private property into
existence, along with the new idea that anything we survey
can become our own personal possession.


And as those colonizers divided that not-so-empty
continent, a whole lot of surveying went on. It was a very
popular profession. For example, three of the four U.S.
presidents whose faces are carved into Mount Rushmore
worked as surveyors. George Washington was sixteen when
he accompanied George William Fairfax on a surveying
expedition in the Shenandoah Valley, becoming one of the
continent’s youngest professional surveyors. Thomas Jefferson
served as the county surveyor of Albemarle County in 1773.


His father, Peter Jefferson, had also been a surveyor. Later,
after the frontier shifted from Virginia to Illinois, a young
Abraham Lincoln took up the profession. “New Boston,
Bath, Petersburg, and Huron were among the towns that he
laid out.”\footnote{David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon \& Schuster, 1995), 52.} And even if Theodore Roosevelt, that fourth face
carved into Mount Rushmore, never worked as a surveyor,
he still loved to see land divided and sold. He claimed that
“civilization” ought to be spread by “the order-loving races of
the earth doing their duty” and acquiring “the world’s waste
spaces.”\footnote{Theodore Roosevelt quoted in Kathleen Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (New York: Knopf, 2002), 126.}


There are reasons why there were suddenly so many
surveyors once the English started colonizing North
America. In 1620, the same year the Mayflower set sail
with some of England’s earliest committed colonizers, the
mathematician, geometer, and astronomer Edmund Gunter
introduced Gunter’s chain. Sixty-six feet long, ten of his
chains by ten of his chains mark ten acres. Together with his
new triangulation methods, surveying became a science. This
made strict property lines possible, and allowed land to be
more accurately quantified and commodified. Trespassing
became an enforceable offense. In tandem with the new
notions of ownership that appeared as the United States
became a nation, a world emerged in which any land could
become exclusively held and forcefully defended.


Exclusive private property was a new development.


Although many of the English colonizers immediately and
irrevocably perceived the indigenous as
“savages,” tribal
land management along the East Coast was not remarkably
different from the English feudal-era methods the colonists
brought with them. Among natives along the East Coast, land
was ultimately held and managed by a chief or other powerful
figure, but this did not constitute “ownership” by that person,
just the power to allocate resources. This person granted tribe
members access to certain things at certain times of the year.


Yet this was still not “ownership.” Land was not “owned,” just
used. In addition to this rotating access to resources, there
were also common areas and shared supplies.


In the English system, everything was ultimately held by the
crown, and a lord or earl granted land and materials as needed.


There were common areas and shared resources here as well.


The English had much more of a tendency to stay put for
centuries, but the indigenous people and the colonists managed
their land similarly. Early New England settlements had a village
green, or common area, usually just a few acres, in the center of
town. There was rarely enough space for all the village livestock
to graze there, but there were common pastures outside of
town. “Children brought their family cow or horse to the green
and left the animal in care of the town herdsman, who then
led the herd to a distant piece of common ground. Late in the
afternoon the herdsman returned with the livestock, and the
children came to the green to fetch home their own animals.”\footnote{John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscapes of America, 1580 to 1845 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 48.}
Gristmills and sawmills operated as public utilities, not private
businesses. Besides some common-field agriculture, there were
also shared woodlands for lumber and hunting.


But when the United States seceded from England,
the crown no longer owned the land. It could become
anyone’s. Everyone could be their own earl. This was part
of an understandable attempt to undermine centuries of
aristocratic control exerted by a few families. But combined
with Gunter’s new systems of surveying, exclusive private
property came rushing into history. Lines were drawn.


Trespassers were prosecuted. The commons disappeared and
were soon forgotten. Rather than a shared resource outside
of town, land became a commodity—one person’s private
possession to be bought and disposed of in any way.


And when the Fifh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
was ratified in 1791, the change became complete. The “takings
clause” of that amendment stipulates that the government will
give “just compensation” if private land is taken for public
use. By making a law about how a government purchases land
from its citizens, exclusive private property rights became
official. The indigenous people, now more than ever, could
be portrayed as outliers to civilization. They had no fences.


They shared their resources. It was all suddenly unthinkable.


The United States, with a new relationship to land, created
new arguments to justify grabbing every bit of soil on which
the original occupants stood. In 1823, the case of Johnson
v. M’Intosh came before the U.S. Supreme Court. Tomas
Johnson had bought land from the Piankeshaw Tribe. William
M’Intosh had supposedly received a land grant for some of
the same land from the Federal Government, although it
turns out that the two parcels did not actually overlap. But the
facts were accepted as presented and the ruling stands. Chief
Justice John Marshall, writing for a unanimous court, declared
that, “While the different nations of Europe respected the
rights of the natives as occupants, they asserted the ultimate
dominion to be in themselves, and claimed and exercised, as
a consequence of this ultimate dominion, a power to grant
the soil while yet in the possession of the natives.”\footnote{Johnson \& Grahm’s Lessee v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543, 574 (1823).}


The indigenous people were suddenly subsumed and
consumed by a legal system that enshrined private property,
especially if any white people wanted their land. They soon
found themselves dispossessed with increasing frequency and
violence. In 1864, to mention an especially egregious example,
the U.S. Army descended on a Cheyenne and Arapaho village
at Sand Creek, Colorado, killing and mutilating as many as
150, most of whom were women and children. The mistake
the Cheyenne and Arapaho made was signing a treaty for
land that turned out to have gold in it.


It seems like colonizers love gold. An 1868 treaty had
given the seemingly worthless Black Hills to the natives in
perpetuity. But in the mid-1870s, with the discovery of gold,
perpetuity lost its meaning. As the Sioux holy man Black Elk
said, white people “had found much of the yellow metal that
they worship and that makes them crazy, and they wanted
to have a road up through our country to where the yellow
metal was.”\footnote{Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (1932: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 9.} The Sioux and Cheyenne refused to sell any
land or lease mineral rights. They were deemed “hostile” by
the government, and the army moved in to make the land
safe for gold-miners.


In June 1876, General Custer and his cavalry attacked
a native encampment, but neither Custer nor any of his
soldiers survived the attack. For the natives, it was a
successful act of self-defense. For the U.S. Government, it
was an unconscionable massacre of their troops. Secretary of
War William Tecumseh Sherman declared that the tribes had
violated the treaty of 1868 by going to war with the United
States. The Cheyenne and Sioux, having been invaded,
were justifiably confused. But with the treaty supposedly
broken, the army really poured in. Everyone was disarmed
and forced onto reservations. Fugitive bands were hunted
down, slaughtered, or arrested. Sitting Bull fled to Canada.
Crazy Horse was caught and stabbed with a bayonet while
in captivity and died. Then the U.S. Government carved the
faces of some of its most powerful surveyors into a mountain.


More than a century later, dispossession and disregard
continue apace, but now it’s not just gold driving injustices
against the indigenous, but fracked oil as well. And private
property laws are one of the main tools used to make this
happen. The Dakota Access Pipeline, designed to move crude
oil from the Bakken Formation in western North Dakota,
through both Dakotas, Iowa, and into Illinois where it might
become less crude and more refined, was going to cross under
the Missouri River north of the mostly white city of Bismarck.


But the citizens complained that this could destroy their
drinking water. The route was changed so that it passed under
the river a half-mile north of the Standing Rock Reservation
through land and under water that had been seized against
the tribe’s will in September 1958, through legislation passed
by Congress that stated, “Any interest Indians may have in the
bed of the Missouri River so far as it is within the boundaries
of the Standing Rock Reservation, are hereby taken by the
United States for the Oahe Project on the Missouri River.”\footnote{Public Law 85–915, September 2, 1958.}


When the Dakota Access Pipeline was rerouted through land
that was “hereby taken,” the people on the reservation, like
the people of Bismarck, complained about threats to their
water. But rather than another rerouting, they were met with
pepper spray, rubber bullets, and attack dogs.


In September 2016, Judge James Boasberg ruled that
the tribe had been sufficiently consulted and the pipeline
could proceed. His statement claims that “A project of this
magnitude ofen necessitates an extensive federal appraisal
and permitting process. Not so here. Domestic oil pipelines,
unlike natural-gas pipelines, require no general approval
from the federal government. In fact, DAPL needs almost
no federal permitting of any kind because 99\% of its route
traverses private land.”\footnote{Standing Rock Sioux Tribe v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, United States District Court for the District of Coulmbia. Civil Action No. 16–1534 (JEB), 2.} So if you own a piece of land, pretty
much as long as you’re not sacrificing children or making
methamphetamines, you can do whatever you want and no
one can stop you. James Boasberg is a judge. It’s his job to
interpret the law. He ruled that “the Tribe has not shown it will
suffer injury that would be prevented by any injunction the
Court could issue.”\footnote{Ibid., 1–2.} In a technical, lawyerly sense, he may be
correct. Put a pipeline through private land, and no one can
legally complain. But from the perspective of the Earth and
its inhabitants’ common interests, he is completely wrong—
especially since the laws and precedents he is interpreting were
made in the afermath of atrocious and embarrassing cases
like Johnson v. M’Intosh. As Kiana Heron writes, the “protests
at Standing Rock today can only be fully understood in light
of this colonial legacy, which from the beginning proclaimed
that native lands were empty, and that native people, were, in
effect, nothing more than the rocks, the trees, the water that
they now so valiantly strive to protect.”\footnote{Kiana Herold, “Terra Nullius and the History of Broken Treaties at Standing Rock,” Intercontinental Cry, November 14, 2016.}


The very same day Judge Boasberg issued his ruling, a
pipeline in Alabama broke and spilled 250,000 gallons of oil.


The governor declared a state of emergency.\footnote{“State of emergency declared afer crucial oil pipeline leaks 250,000 gallons in Alabama,” KFOR, September 16, 2016.} The very next
day, a pipeline in Texas leaked about 33,000 gallons of oil.\footnote{Sire, LP. Released June 1, 1983.}


And this is not just some strange coincidence. Angry gnomes
were not trying to make this judge look foolish. Pipelines fail
almost constantly. According to the United States’ Pipelines
and Hazardous Materials and Safety Administration, there
have been more than 10,000 pipeline failures already this
century. Pipelines are a terrible invention, even exempting
the fracking that fills them or the fossil fuels they bring us
to burn. They just break all the time. But if they’re built on
private property, no one can complain. Private property is
sacrosanct. It’s your land, do as you will.
But maybe instead of worrying about one person’s supposed
right to profit off private land, maybe we should worry about
how we can all continue to live on our shared planet. To quote
Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network,



\begin{quote}


“Our spiritual leaders are opposed to the privatization of
our lands, which means the commoditization of the nature,
water, air we hold sacred.”\footnote{“Trump advisors aim to privatize oil-rich Indian reservations,” Reuters, December 5, 2016.}



\end{quote}


I was at the Oceti Sakowin Camp in Standing Rock
in November 2016, which is situated on the disputed land
“hereby taken” in 1958, and meant to obstruct the completion
of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The very same day The Army
Corps of Engineers issued the camp an eviction notice,
one of the water protectors pointed out to me the ways the
government had closed roads and seized hills so that “They
are leaving us with no option but to trespass.”\footnote{Personal conversation, recorded November 25, 2016.} Police
and National Guard stood along arbitrary and debatable
boundary lines. Behind those police, the pipeline was being
laid. Anyone who crossed onto that land could be arrested for
trespassing. No other crimes were required.


The sheer volume of law enforcement brought in to protect
a pipeline by enforcing trespassing laws was outlandish. The
night we arrived, it was too late and too dark to drive to the
camp and set up a tent without being a nuisance to people
trying to sleep off the sting of rubber bullets. We stopped in
Bismarck, pulled into a hotel, and saw more than half the
parking lot was filled with police vehicles. Scared, we went to
another hotel. This one was better. Instead of more than half,
slightly less than half the parking lot was cop cars. It seemed
marginally safer. We stayed there. The next day, trying to
get to Standing Rock, we encountered a roadblock, turned
around, and took a different route. Trucks heading toward
the camp were pulled over and searched. Military helicopters
flew above. Trespassers beware.


An entire continent has been surveyed, sold, and turned
into private property that can be ripped up and turned into
rubble. If anyone objects, the police turn up to protect the
right to make rubble. Our collective needs don’t matter. The
commons have become a piece of the past, receding from
lived experience and into the history books. Need, intent, and
collective interest have become irrelevant to land use. Who
bought it? That’s all anyone needs to know.


We’re told this is normal. This is reality and we had better
get used to it. But now is the aberration. The commons
existed for millennia. Private property has existed for a few
centuries. Our current system is the anomaly. We do not need
to live this way.


So it is perhaps only now that someone could sell the stars
and no one would think it’s all that weird, when the Earth is
no longer our common inheritance, but a conglomerate of
commodities circling the sun. We divide it up and do as we
will. And at night, we look into the sky and watch distant
products twinkle. But why not? If we can buy and sell almost
any piece of the Earth, why not buy the rest of the Universe?


Of course, what the International Star Registry does
is pretty harmless, especially compared to buying land
to put in a leaky pipeline. People don’t destroy their stars
after purchasing them. They just show their friends their
parchment proofs of purchase and their maps of coordinates.


But the very fact that the International Star Registry could be
created and continue to exist says a great deal about how far
we are from having a reasonable approach to living.


If we don’t eradicate the mentality that makes the
International Star Registry possible, if we continue to slice
up our planet, and declare this chunk yours and that chunk
mine, we’ll just slice it up until there’s nothing left but dust.


We certainly don’t need to return to feudal or tribal systems
of land management. The future will be different from any
past or present. But we don’t need to accept what we have. A
planet composed of private land, surrounded by stars for sale,
is not one we have to tolerate. Exclusive private property is
relatively new. We can make it history.

\chapter{Time is Not Money}


Time is money. But time is a human construct. And so is
money. But this does not mean these things are not real.


Many human constructs are real. Buildings are real. Cars are
real. Even hatred is real. Time and money are real. We just
made them up.


So time is money. A simple enough sentence. An
equivalence. Just like two and two is four, the items on either
side of “is” are equal. Because each side is equivalent, we can
and do sell our time for money. But the only transferable time is
the highly artificial and contrived kind kept by our clocks and
calendars. We do this because we need money—exchangeable
units of value—to survive, pay our debts, and stay out of trouble
with the authorities. Money is a social relation. The only reality
it has is the reality we choose to give it.


Money arose as an intermediary between goods and
as a means to tabulate debt. Rather than determining the
relative value between every two bartered items, each is
judged against a third. Initially, it was something like goats,
cloth, stones, or whatever easily attained, non-monopolized
commodity had become the mediator of exchange. But such
items may be perishable or non-standard. They may fluctuate
in value due to scarcity or production costs.


Precious metals can be minted in standard sizes and
shapes and won’t rot, and so they entered into common—
but not universal—use. But even precious metals are
a commodity among commodities, and this can cause
confusion. In England in the late 1600s, raw silver and gold
had a higher value than these same materials as minted
money. Clever crooks began clipping coins, melting the
clippings, selling these melted clippings for more coins,
and then starting the whole process over again. Clipped
and unclipped coins circulated together. Perhaps not
surprisingly, the clipped coins were treated exactly the same
as the untouched ones. A shilling was still a shilling, no
matter what it weighed.


The philosopher John Locke entered the ensuing debate
and declared that gold and silver possess a “natural” value that
predates the state. According to Locke, it was time to pull the
ruined coins and mint new ones that matched their “natural”
value. But the rampant practice of recognizing any shilling as a
shilling shows Locke’s error. Money is carried for its purchasing
power. If that power remains unchanged, the weight and shape
of the money doesn’t matter. Values are assessed and exchanges
are made by social practice. Humans may ascribe value to
bits and pieces of the natural world, but this is done without
nature’s consent. There are no “natural” values.


We now use fiat money—money disconnected from
any commodity. But however value is assessed, all forms of
money are arbitrary. It’s not like people print money based on
how much value there is “out there in the world. Value does
not exist independent of social practice. We just print money.


And then it exists, and has a value. We can choose or refuse
to recognize it. Of course, we are compelled and coerced to
recognize it.


And so we sell our time. But this time, like our money, is
a purely social product. Time can be bisected, divided, and
measured in any number of ways. It is gauged in relation to
physical events. The tick of a clock. The swing of a pendulum.


The vibration of an atom. The rotation of the Earth. Years,
minutes, and seconds are not part of the Universe. We may
create these units in relation to natural phenomena, but we
are not required to do so. It’s a lot like placing a political
boundary along a river or a mountain range. In both cases,
we apply an element of nature to a social practice, but there is
really nothing natural about it.


Time is a confounding subject. Is it even real? Does it
exist independent of our minds? As Saint Augustine writes
in his Confessions, “What is time? Who can explain this easily
and briefly? Who can comprehend this even in thought so
as to articulate the answer in words? Yet what do we speak
of, in our familiar everyday conversation, more than of time?


We surely know what we mean when we speak of it. We also
know what we mean when we hear someone else talking
about it. What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I
know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know.”\footnote{Saint Augustine, Confessions (400: Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), 230.}


Some have argued that time is unreal by portraying it
as a series of points. The argument goes something like the
following. Since the past is gone, lost to all but memory, and
the future hasn’t arrived yet, the present is the only time we
have. And how long is that? An instant? And how long is an
instant? A nanosecond? The blink of an eye? It turns out that
the present conceived as a point cannot have a duration. If it
did, we could then divide that duration into a past, present
and future, and then that present could be further divided,
on and on forever. So is that it? Is time unreal because the
present is the only time we have and that is no time at all?


Much like Zeno’s similar arguments against motion, such
allegations of the unreality of time fail because they have no
relation to our experience. Time, like motion, is perceived
as a continuum. The ticking of a clock marks time because
we remember the previous tick and anticipate the impending
tock. There is a mental retention of the past that is linked to
our experience of the present and an expected future. A series
of perceptions does not yield temporal passage. Perceptions
need to be unified into a sequence.


This temporal passage is constructed in our minds, afer
events occur. Separate neural pathways receive distinct
signals—sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations—
which then travel to the brain at various finite velocities.


These signals arrive at different moments, leaving the brain
the difficult task of reassembling all this information to try to
figure out what just happened. We live in reality’s wake. So is
time purely mental? Does it exist in the Universe or only afer
our minds put it together?


Although it may remain beyond our grasp, there does
seem to be a form of temporality we perceive but do not
create. Rivers run to the sea, and stones turn to sand, but not
because we will the future into the present. But what is this
external temporality, and how do experience it? How do we
perceive the Universe as it flows around and through us?


Before relativity, when Newtonian mechanics dominated
our understanding of the physical world, space and time were
treated as separate entities, both of which were universal,
absolute, and independent of perspective. Time flowed
equably. Space had verifiable positions. But Einstein showed
that there is no difference between space and time. There is
only spacetime, and there is nothing universal about it. Only
relationships between aspects of the Universe are observable. If
you found yourself floating through space, you would have no
way to judge your velocity. You would first need to determine
what you were moving in relation to. Is it that planet? That
star over there? Or maybe that galaxy? Being based on matter
in relative motion, time has no verifiability beyond a single
frame of reference, and each of these questions will produce
a different answer.


Einstein asks us to imagine one person riding on a train
and another standing on the ground as the train passes.


Two flashes of lightning occur. One is in front of the train.


The other is behind it. The person on the ground perceives
these flashes as simultaneous. The person on the train,
moving toward one flash and away from the other, sees the
flash the train is approaching first. Simultaneity is only ever
apparent simultaneity. There is no way to know what really
happened when.


In his Confessions, besides addressing just how baffling
time is, Saint Augustine discusses the theological problem
of just what God did in all that time before creation. Afer
all, isn’t the sudden decision to make a Universe a bit out of
character for an eternally constant being? Augustine astutely
points out, centuries before Einstein, that time requires
matter. The question of what God did “then” misses the point
since there was no “then” when there were no things. Time is
dependent on matter in motion. There is not space and time.


There is only spacetime. This is much more than a semantic
distinction, as it impacts our understanding of what the
Universe is and how we perceive it.


So there are not many things more artificial than the time
kept by our clocks and calendars. Yet this socially constructed
time is not only accepted, it has become one of the main tools
we use to dominate and control one another. We are told that
time is money, and we dutifully sell carefully measured pieces
of our lives to the highest bidder in exchange for the means
to stay alive. Time is money. And like the time kept by clocks
and calendars, money is also a human creation, only even
more obviously so.


In Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, a spy embedded
in London’s anarchist underworld is threatened with
dismissal unless he fulfills his role as an agent provocateur
and does some actual provoking. He is assigned the task
of blowing up the Greenwich Observatory, the site of the
prime meridian, the basis for the world’s time zones, and a
symbol of officially standardized time. Joseph Conrad was
not sympathetic to anarchism, and the Secret Agent is filled
with irony and satire. But despite that satire, an element
of satori still shines through. The time kept by our clocks
and the money kept by our banks are a product of socially
constructed spacetime. This spacetime is much more than
a medium of movement. Its logic and structure determine
the limits of the possible. Changing the world will involve
changing the ways we navigate spacetime. Clocks are a
worthy target.


Because we have made time and money equivalent,
money permeates all our time, as well as our space. It is
spacetime, after all. Before the capitalist era, wealth was
created and maintained mainly through land ownership.


Money and merchants were relegated to the ports and
periphery. The wealthy were the landed aristocracy, and
they did not sully their good names by engaging in trade.


The transition from wealth through land ownership to
wealth through the investment in marketable goods brought
commerce from the periphery and into everyday life. As
time spent producing these goods became increasingly
important, clock towers replaced cathedrals. The overland
trade routes traversed mostly by merchants became less
unique, as every stretch of road became a trade route and
every citizen a merchant.


The logic of commerce produced and produces our
spacetime. Our bodies extend into it, and we become tied to
its rhythms. Through this interaction, we create an identity.


We value, prize, and defend it. But it is produced by a
constellation of historically situated forces. A constructed
self in a constructed reality. From birth, we are educated and
molded to “properly” navigate produced spacetime. We are
conditioned and encased. We are like machines, designed
and capable of amazing tasks, but only within the limits of
that design. Without a rebellion from the given, there can
be no true creativity. One of our most debilitating notions
is the belief that what exists must exist. We can and should
disconnect from the given. This will entail the total rejection
of habit, a complete mental revolt, and the refusal of all
ideological conditioning.


Now everybody—

\chapter{Walking Each Other Home}



\begin{quote}


 \emph{We’re all just walking each other home.}
Ram Dass



\end{quote}


He was young and he was lost. But the nameless
narrator in Alejandro Zambra’s Ways of Going Home
found his house all by himself. His parents looked all over
for him. But when they got home, he was already there.


“You went a different way,” my mother said later, angry,
her eyes still swollen.


You were the one who went a different way, I thought,
but I didn’t say it.\footnote{See \href{http://www.starregistry.com/}{www.starregistry.com}}


There are many ways of going home.


\hairline


In “This Must Be the Place” by the Talking Heads, David
Byrne sings, “Home is where I want to be, but I guess I’m
already there.”\footnote{David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon \& Schuster, 1995), 52.} He has described this song as a “series
of non sequiturs, phrases that may have strong emotional
resonance but don’t have any narrative qualities.”\footnote{Theodore Roosevelt quoted in Kathleen Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (New York: Knopf, 2002), 126.} Yet even
adrif in this sea of non-narrative non sequiturs, the word
“home” still retains its powers. Just speaking or singing the
word can act as a potent, even magical, incantation.


\hairline


“Home. Everybody wants to go home. Even when they’re
old. Even when they’re small.”\footnote{John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscapes of America, 1580 to 1845 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 48.} These constitute all the
lyrics to the song “Home” by the band Low. It may seem
brief, but there’s really no need to elaborate. We all know
what it means. Afer all, everybody wants to go home.


\hairline


I spent the first part of my childhood living in a house at
the end of a gravel road. Our backyard led directly into a
large cluster of trees containing dirt paths and secret forts.


Beyond those trees, a field filled with wild strawberries led
to another group of trees and an old, rusting truck. These
are the places the word “home” conjures for me. Not just
the house, but the land around it, the places where the area
children would gather, play, and explore.


Once, I knocked on my neighbor’s door to see if he wanted
to come outside, but he told me he would rather watch Star
Trek. I slammed the door on his head. His parents were very
upset. My parents grounded me. But I think I had a point.


\hairline


They still air Star Trek reruns, but the woods are gone. The
gravel road is paved. It no longer dead ends, but extends
into the new subdivision that has supplanted the woods,
the field, and the abandoned truck. Enclosed spaces with
lockable doors have replaced the open spaces I still think of
as my first home.


\hairline


A home is not simply four walls or a fixed residence. It is a
widely variable set of circumstances in which self, society,
and nature can sit in a dynamic, collaborative relationship.


The materials of home flow in and out, forever in flux,
creating a place where our ever-shifing selves can develop
and thrive. We have a physical home, a cultural home, a
geographic home. We may be at home in the countryside,
at home in the city, or we may not even feel at home in
our own skin. But a home is where we can be or become
ourselves. It doesn’t matter if we’ve ever even been there. Just
imagining its outline is enough to inspire longing.


\hairline


The place I think of as my first home no longer exists in
any meaningful sense. All my favorite parts have been
bulldozed. I cannot return.


But it was only ever an abstraction in a child’s mind. Now
it’s an adult’s memory of a child’s abstraction. Of course I
cannot return. Just where would I go? A home is only ever
an idea. It is imaginary. But it is real.


\hairline


As Ursula K. Le Guin writes,



\begin{quote}


Home, imagined, comes to be. It is real, realer than any
other place, but you can’t get to it unless your people
show you how to imagine it—whoever your people are.
They may not be your relatives. They may never have
spoken your language. They may have been dead for a
thousand years. They may be nothing but words printed
on paper, ghosts of voices, shadows of minds. But they
can guide you home.\footnote{Johnson \& Grahm’s Lessee v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543, 574 (1823).}



\end{quote}


\hairline


If external conditions make a home unimaginable,
it can’t exist.


When you have no ground on which to stand, your
imagination can’t take you very far.


\hairline


Humans arose in what is now called Ethiopia. Since then,
seeking home, we have covered the globe.


\hairline


If we say we are sending refugees escaping famines or wars
back to their “homes,” it is a misuse of the word. They can
hopefully find a home, but it probably won’t be found at
their place of origin.


And when teenagers leave abusive families, they may be
running away, but they are not running away from home. A
home is their goal, not their point of departure.


This is why “homeless” describes the state of “homelessness”
so well. Renaming the homeless “street people” or something
misses the point.The street is not the problem. Homelessness—
the lack of a multifaceted, sustaining environment—is. And
many more of us are homeless than we might like to imagine.


\hairline


In The Wizard of Oz, both the novel from 1900 and the film
from 1938, a tornado blows Dorothy Gale from Kansas to
the Land of Oz. She seeks the aid of a wizard to help her
return, but the wizard accidently flies away without her. She
appears to be stranded forever. In the film version, Glinda
the Good Witch of the North finally informs Dorothy that
“You’ve always had the power to go home.”\footnote{Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (1932: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 9.} The magic
slippers she has been wearing can take her there. Dorothy’s
face is then lit unlike any other moment in the movie.


Through the power of film, we see that she is enlightened.


She has always had the power to get home, but external
forces were making this simple task seem impossible.


\hairline


Dorothy Gale was uprooted by a natural disaster. Another
Dorothy, Dorothy Day, was eight years old and living in
Oakland when the great earthquake of 1906 struck. As she
later wrote of the earthquake’s afermath:



\begin{quote}


What I remember most plainly about the earthquake
was the human warmth and kindness of everyone
aferward. For days refugees poured out of burning
San Francisco and camped in Idora Park and the race
track in Oakland. \dots{} Mother and all our neighbors
were busy from morning to night cooking hot meals.
They gave away every extra garment they possessed.
They stripped themselves to the bone in giving,
forgetful of the morrow. While the crisis lasted, people
loved each other.\footnote{Public Law 85–915, September 2, 1958.}



\end{quote}


Disasters can quite literally tear down the walls around us,
take away our isolated atomism, and necessitate new ways of
interacting. When the existing order crumbles, new systems
can arise spontaneously, ones ofen based on care and
compassion. We can learn to love each other. A home made
invisible and impossible by our collective isolation suddenly
becomes visible and inhabitable.


\hairline


Every being, every bit of matter, is at the center of its
universe. An endless plurality of centers overlap and
interact. We travel like turtles, our homes on our backs,
pulling a universe along with us.


When I enter your home, I bring mine in with me.


Treat everyone like an invited guest. Behave like an invited
guest. Help others meet their needs. Provide them with
comfort. Enter others’ spaces politely and respectfully.


Remove your shoes if asked. Help with the dishes. Play with
the children.


Wherever you are, remember, you are in someone’s home.


\hairline


A few years afer the nameless narrator in Ways of Going
Home found his own way home, there was an earthquake.


“The night of the earthquake was the first time that I realized
everything could come tumbling down. Now I think it’s a good
thing to know. It’s necessary to remember it every second.”\footnote{Standing Rock Sioux Tribe v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, United States District Court for the District of Coulmbia. Civil Action No. 16–1534 (JEB), 2.}


The existing institutions that keep so many of us incapable
of creating a home could crumble at any moment. When
they crumble, we could live in better, more benevolent ways.


We could learn to love each other. We could learn to live as
neighbors. But do we really need to wait for total collapse?


Or can we just make sure everyone gets home safely? Can
we start living in ways that make sense? Can we find our
own way home?


Everyone, please, make yourselves at home.


1964). The terms are his, not mine.









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The Ted K Archive





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Adam Krause

The Revolution Will Be Hilarious and Other Essays



2018


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