The Wizards of Ozymandias

CHAPTER 51 A Cost/Benefit Analysis of the Human Spirit:
The Luddites Revisited

Institutional structuring of our lives has adverse consequences that reach far beyond the material costs that are harmful to us not only as individuals, but as they contribute to social conflict and the collapse of civilizations. The effect that such behavior has on the inner awareness of what it means to be human is something we rarely focus upon as we devote ourselves to our “practical” pursuits. I believe that each of us has a fundamental need for spiritual or transcendent experiences; a need to connect with the rest of the universe in ways that are meaningful to our innermost sense of who we are. We have been ignoring such needs, much to our detriment.

It is these costs to the human spirit that most threaten the well being of all mankind, and to which the attention of intelligent men and women must now be directed. As Viktor Frankl observed in his National Socialist concentration camp experiences, what hurt so much was not the physical pain inflicted by brutish guards, but the indignity, the lack of respect shown to one as a human being, the loss of a sense of individuality in being shorn of everything—personal possessions, even one’s body hair—that made them unique.1

The spiritual depletion of our lives can be identified in numerous ways. The anger, violence, and depression that have become commonplace in society; school children who have their sense of spontaneity and adventure numbed by drugs to make them more amenable to the control of parents and school officials; adults who drug themselves with legally prescribed tranquilizers, anti-depressants, amphetamines, or alcohol; or who resort to illegal drugs in order to seek, through chemistry, what they cannot find within themselves or their social systems. Why do we not grasp the message hidden in popular names for such substances: a synonym for “alcohol” is “spirits,” while various drugs are referred to as “angel dust,” “ecstasy,” “paradise,” “blue heaven,” “upper,” “joy powder,” or “God’s medicine”? Instead of condemning and criminalizing drug use—which only adds to the loss of control people have over their lives—intelligent people might ask why so many are unable to find spiritual expression in their institutionally centered lives and look for it in ersatz forms.

For those who doubt the power that the human spirit exerts over our sense of life, recall the impact of some of the visual news images from recent years: the naked Vietnamese girl running and screaming down a road following an American napalm attack; pictures of the Berlin Wall being torn down by individuals; or the photo of one of the many victims of American terrorism, six-year old Elian Gonzalez, with a machine-gun shoved in his face by one of Janet Reno’s storm-troopers. Or consider that most powerful of photo images—one I have hanging on my office wall—of Wang Wei-Lin, confronting that row of impenetrable tanks in Tiananmen Square. Western journalists, trained to feed off leftovers thrown into the trough by their political masters, tended to see only political symbolism in this event. But it was not the American flag or the dollar sign around which these young Chinese rallied, but the Statue of Liberty. This man did not seem intent on overpowering the state—or even the tanks—but appeared to be making a declaration on behalf of reclaiming the human spirit. It was the spirit of mankind, represented in the form of a solitary human being, standing up to the faceless, dispirited machinery of state power, that sent a common chill up the spines of most of us.

Fragmenting ourselves into “physical” and “spiritual” dimensions has been a major source of social conflict. The discord may also become internalized within each of us, as we become increasingly beaten down by a sense of powerlessness over our own lives, and may eventually surrender to an inner despair that finds expression as “what’s the use?” In the language of students of chaos, unless we reverse our entropic decline, unless we can rekindle the inner fire that has gone out through our neglect, we may collapse into spiritual bankruptcy. An experience I had a number of years ago provides a helpful metaphor. I attended a photographic exhibit in which a scientist displayed his experiences in observing the eye of a mosquito under a microscope. Initially, the eye was afire with brilliant, dancing colors of orange and green. But suddenly, the eye turned black; the fire had gone out of the system; the mosquito was dead.

Our well-organized war upon the human spirit is at the core of the crisis now being faced by all of Western Civilization.

Spiritual needs are central to our lives; they energize our inner sense of being through which we find meaning. But if institutions are to dominate our lives, would not these entities find it in their interests to satisfy these needs? Is this, in fact, not the professed role that churches play? At first glance, the answer might appear to be “yes,” but upon closer examination we discover that such is rarely the case. Churches institutionalized God and, in so doing, have discouraged us from seeking our own godliness. The inadequacy of institutions to satisfy our needs for transcendence is found in the fundamental distinction between individual and collective behavior. Spiritual expression, like other forms of emotional experience, is peculiarly individualized. For the same reason that only each person can satisfy their own hunger or thirst, or feel fear, love, or any form of excitement; only individuals can experience their inner connection with the rest of the universe. Passion is confined to individuals. Institutions are but abstractions, the creatures of human thought. But the currency of thought is other abstractions—words—and spirituality is wrapped up in experiences that transcend thought. Institutions function only through individuals, and individuals can supply such organizations with abstract, secondary expressions of inner experiences, but they can never move beyond words. But words, as Korzybski reminds us, are never the “things” to which they refer. This is what makes it so difficult to communicate—much less to organize—our inner sensations.

Relating all of this to political systems, a given state may, with the best of intentions, associate itself with the abstraction of “liberty.” Indeed, the Bush administration defended its repressive, statist policies as “operation enduring freedom.” But the word “liberty,” being an abstraction, is always less than the experience of not having one’s will violated with regard to one’s person or property. Because “liberty,” as a word, is less than the experience of liberty, it must—within a legal/political context—always be subject to interpretation. The inner experiences that we associate with our spiritual needs, do not translate into anything of value—or even comprehension—to institutions. This is why, in an institutionalized world, whatever is nonmaterial tends to be regarded as immaterial.

How are we to give up our attachments to abstract systems and reclaim the spiritual dimension of our nature? The answer to that question lies in returning to the point at which we lost contact with this part of our lives; namely, when we accepted the mind/body division of our nature and, as a consequence, became attached to—and made ourselves dependent upon—those institutional forms that promised us physical security in exchange for our subservience to their interests.

To get some insight into this question, I want to revisit those hobgoblins of the Industrial Revolution, the Luddites. Because I have long defended the Industrial Revolution as, perhaps, the most humanizing period in history, you may ask what possible message I could derive from the Luddites. The word, itself, conjures up images of collective ignorance, mob destructiveness, and the dangers of mass-mindedness. For the most part, the Luddite movement emerged from craftsmen whose economic interests were challenged by the developing factory system, and whose “machine-breaking” responses derived from the same kind of anti-competitive sentiments that later fired the “progressive” and New Deal eras. So as to relieve any sense of anxiety you may be feeling at my suggestion that we revisit the Luddites, let me assure you that I am herewith making no defense of machine-breaking riots, nor am I embracing the neo-Luddite sentiments favoring the technological dismantling of modern society.

I do believe, however, that the Luddites may have been about something more than the reactive destruction of machines. I suspect there was an awareness—exhibited, today, by members of the Amish subculture—that dependence upon technological systems portended an eventual loss of our sense of humanity; a fear that society would quickly become dominated by a technical imperative, in which everything, including human beings, would be little more than standardized, fungible, institutional servomechanisms. “Libertarian” and “anarchist” traditions have, at their very core, an insistence upon supporting the individuality, autonomy, and spontaneous nature of each human being, and to distrust any form of organization that threatens such values. Those who question the validity of these concerns might ask how and why a nation, so long steeped in the rhetoric of individual liberty, has so easily turned into a mass-minded collective.

The temptation of many who observe the dehumanizing nature of our modern world is to lash out at the technology that they perceive as the cause. But to do so makes no more sense than attacking gun manufacturers or gun owners for the violence committed by those few who use guns as tools of destruction. I recall—as a child at the end of World War II—hearing otherwise intelligent people arguing that dumping military weapons into the seas would end wars. Such thinking completes the vicious circle of mechanistic thinking: humans become machinelike, while machines take on the human attributes of will, directing our behavior. It is not technology that has turned human beings into dispirited mechanisms, but our willingness to think of our lives as dependent upon such machinery, and attaching our sense of identity to the systems that produce and control the technologies.

Those who reject technology outright make as big a mistake as those who allow themselves to become attached to technologies. Each dismisses an important aspect of our humanity. We are tool-makers. The machines we create are expressions of our nature; extensions of the human life process. To think otherwise is to fragment ourselves, and to imagine that evolutionary processes ought to have left us governed only by fixed instincts. Whether for good or bad, we have been the creators of the world in which we live. The Industrial Revolution; inventiveness; discoveries; the building of skyscrapers, bridges, and other cathedrals, have all been expressions of the human spirit. We should ask ourselves: what were the inner forces that drove Edison to continue inventing? Might they have been the same spiritual needs that kept Van Gogh painting and Beethoven composing? But to attach ourselves to the created forms is to institutionalize and petrify the very spirit that created them. It is to worship the structure by dissipating the process.

Furthermore, because we have created machines, they provide us an opportunity to discover a great deal about our sense of being. Have we projected onto their forms and systems a sense of how we think of ourselves? Are machines our cloned images, in which we see our own reflections? How else do we explain the machine-like ways in which we think of ourselves? We speak of getting “warmed up” for work, or “running out of gas,” or being “turned-on” or “turned-off” by others; we imagine ourselves to be “big wheels” in life, or “cogs in the machine” who may, on occasion, get our “wires crossed.” We suffer from “burn out,” and “let off steam” so as not to “blow a gasket” or a “fuse” or become “unhinged.” We speak of having a “screw loose,” or “going to pieces,” and resort to drugs or alcohol in order to “get fixed” and “get in gear.” We speak of ourselves as “assets” or “resources” to our workplace or community, and are more likely to regard our brain as computer-like, than to think of computers as brain-like.

Those who do not understand the Amish often imagine that their resistance to new technologies arises from a sense of “evil” they see in such tools. But this is not the case. The Amish do employ tools, but if someone wants to consider bringing a new technology into the community, the Amish study it with this thought in mind: will acceptance of this technology make us dependent upon the external world, such that we will be tempted to change our ways? An automobile, for instance, would make the Amish have to rely on parts manufacturers, tire and battery sellers, and petroleum companies to keep it operative.

What if you and I began thinking this way? Can our work become what farming or carpentry are to the Amish, or what architecture was to Frank Lloyd Wright, namely, expressions of our inner sense in the material world? Rather than seeking employment primarily by the standard of how well the job pays, can we discover a kind of work that is so inwardly rewarding that we would pay someone to let us do it, and then figure out how to get well-paid doing it?

I assume that most readers have developed a strong dependency on computers—a tool that has managed to insinuate itself into our lives in recent years. How many intrusions and restrictions on our lives have we begun to accept [for example, government surveillance of our e-mail and Internet website visits and transactions] rather than give up the convenience of our computers? What if state or federal governments were to announce significantly greater inroads on our liberty as the price to pay for our being entitled to continue enjoying this technology? How many of us are prepared to walk away from these machines and return to pen and ink and Xerox machines?

Perhaps the Luddites—whose fears were machine-centered—have less to offer us in our search for the reclamation of our souls than do another group revered by my Irish ancestors and, perhaps for genetic reasons, by myself: the leprechauns. For those of you whose upbringing was so destitute that you cannot even imagine the existence of these wondrous beings, and for those of you who long ago gave up your childlike assurances of the enchanted nature of the world in which you live, let me introduce you to the leprechauns. According to Irish folklore—which is the only publication of record acknowledged by these beings—the leprechauns are industrious souls who place great value on two factors in their lives: [1] their accumulated gold, and [2] their individual liberty. No sack-clothed ascetics they: the leprechauns love their material wealth, and will do just about anything to keep it. If you manage to steal their gold, there will be hell to pay in their efforts to get it back. Many a tale has been told of these mysterious folk hiding in bushes and watching, with both sadness and anger, as thieves steal their hidden treasure. They nevertheless will not reveal themselves, for the one thing they will never risk in trying to protect their gold is their liberty.

If we are to end the material and spiritual division in our thinking, and learn to live with a sense of wholeness that most of our lives lack, can we learn from the Amish or the leprechauns how to value our material tools and other possessions without becoming attached to them? Can we understand that the greatest threat to individual liberty has always been in our willingness to value anything beyond ourselves more highly than we do our own sense of being? Can we end the practice of progressively lowering the price of our liberty as we negotiate for the preservation of our attachments?

Our well-organized world has become less and less relevant to the inner lives of most men and women. Those of us who have a passion for individual liberty have a wonderful opportunity to address these unfulfilled needs in ways that no others, of whom I am aware, have managed to do. When millions of human beings, throughout the world, come together in demonstrations to protest a war even before it has begun, you can be assured that the human spirit remains alive beneath the hardened surface of events in our lives; that the inner voices that define the essence of humanity have not been fully ground down by the dehumanizing machinery of state power. Wang Wei-Lin may have been silenced, but his spirit has not.

To communicate with others as to these concerns requires a totally new perspective. How we view economic systems or law, or the study of history, government, or sociology, is a subset of the question of how we view individual liberty. And whether we value individual liberty or not is a subset of our attitudes about the sanctity of life itself. As a consequence, if we are to understand any of these areas of human behavior with wholeness and integrity, we must learn to incorporate a spiritual awareness into our analyses. We must, in other words, abandon our fragmentary and divisive approaches to understanding the human condition. We must learn a new language, one that can translate our inner voices into conversations with the outer world.

We have figured out how best to provide for the satisfaction of our material needs. Those who understand the practical importance of reclaiming control over our lives, property, and transactions with others now need to focus on the question: why is it important to do so? Do we understand the significance of reclaiming the spiritual dimensions of our humanness? Can we learn to calculate all these factors into our thoughts and actions? Once we ask such questions with regularity, we may look to the day when the human spirit walks away from its self-imposed bondage. In that day, men and women may discover that death in service to the state is not heroic; that obedience to power does not confer meaning upon one’s life; and that a lengthened leg-chain is not to be confused with liberty.

We must begin with the awareness that abstractions—such as institutions—are spiritless, sterile entities, able to pursue their ends only through the actions of individuals who identify themselves with institutional purposes; and that the interests of humanity transcend such artificial forms. Only individuals suffer pain, dream, experience love and joy, and eventually die. Only individuals make value judgments and act in furtherance of such values. Only individuals transport, through DNA, the future of mankind from one generation to the next. Each of us is biologically and experientially unique, and liberty is the only condition in which we can express our uniqueness. If we are to discover our connectedness with the world, we must understand that what we have in common with one another is the need to protect the conditions in which the liberty of each of us can be exercised. Only if we learn to respect the inviolability of each individual can mankind hope to survive. You and I are mankind, . . . its present and its future.

We must then declare to ourselves, as well as to our neighbors, that mankind, integrated in both body and spirit, will not only survive, but prosper in this world; that life belongs to the living, not to abstract collectives, regardless of their exalted trappings or the duration of their tenure over the minds of men and women. We must further declare that the spirit of mankind is going to survive on this planet, in the only place in which it can ever be found, namely, in the autonomous and spontaneous expressions of individuals. It is time for those who believe otherwise to stand aside, as we support one another in the effort to reclaim our souls!

 

Excerpted from The Murray N. Rothbard Memorial Lecture, given by Butler Shaffer at the Austrian Scholars Conference, The Ludwig von Mises Institute, at Auburn, Alabama, March 15, 2003.

2Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963).

• 1T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men, 1925.
• 2When I first decided to chronicle the collapse of Western Civilization, I assumed I would have a sufficient amount of time to observe and comment upon the transformations taking place. I shared T.S. Eliot’s sentiment that: “This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.” Surely a vibrant culture that took centuries to develop would have to experience a prolonged demise. I could not imagine that its downfall would be as precipitous as it has proven to be. Because of the complexities involved, it is difficult to identify a specific date or period when the descent began. Suffice it to say that the process was well underway by the time Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize!