Reflections on Thoreau's majority of one

 I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait until they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them.  I think that it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right than his neighbor constitutes a majority of one. (Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, Prospero Books ed., p. 288)

As a life-long progressive, sympathetic to the cause of social justice, unafraid of the ‘nanny state’ and more skeptical of the authoritarianism of the conservative right than of the argument against ‘big government,’, I open with words borrowed from Thoreau, that I, along with perhaps others, could do well to re-read, and to reflect upon. In a matter such as the abolition of slavery, even a single person who holds a position that opposes it and seeks to eliminate it, can, and even must, consider himself or herself a majority of one. And while Thoreau is a strong and authentic voice for limited government, and has, in many quarters, become a mentor for the many voices echoing the Federalist Papers, and thus not exactly a beacon for the ‘social justice side,’ nevertheless, there is something resoundingly inspiring in the disciplined discernment of ‘being more right than his neighbor’.

Of course, we all live between ethical and moral and religious opposites, the extremes of which, today, seem to be attempting, in a zero-sum game, to eliminate the other side on the political stage in America especially. Clearly in the ascendency currently, the millions of MAGA supporters believe that their leader has been ‘sent by God’ as a kind of messiah, to ‘bring about the kingdom of God here on earth now’ as they hubristically and naively and dangerously trumpet their conviction. Indeed, it is their very conviction, as an absolute imperative, in which they are impaled on their own petard. Starting on the level of attaching a religious conviction to a human being, as if he (or a ‘she’) were ‘sent by God’ is not merely inexcusable for rational and religious and historical and cognitive reasons; it betrays their very movement. And then, to pontificate that ‘others’ (whomever and whichever those may be at any given moment depending on the vagaries and whims of their messiah and his cult) must be eliminated, effectively excommunicated, to borrow a religious notion that attempts to make sacred their horrendous and heinous acts of deportation, incarceration, dismissal, firing, and the hubristic hymns of self-congratulations with every morbid headline and detail, not only sounds alarms around the globe, but also betrays their very justification. And it is not only a moral/ethical justification; it is also an economical, political, military, environmental and existential justification that they betray.

Dismissing the ‘others’ for whatever specious, distracting, irrelevant, superficial, reductionistic and unsustainable justification, displays the complete emptiness of their purpose…..it has not purpose or meaning except to justify the existence and empowerment, indeed the worship, of their “sacred” leader, who is, undoubtedly, merely a papier-mache projection of the summation of the fears, bigotries, prejudices and hatreds of the cult. Such a reiteration of the fateful and hateful river Styx, in modern face and voice, is so deeply recognized and hated by all of the ‘others’ including this scribe, as to render little to no ambiguity about what ‘side’ any ‘god’ in a religious sense, might be on.

And while there are a myriad of hurdles, obstacles, mountains and head-winds to see and walk through in order to neutralize this Stygian river of total blackness, the first step may well begin when each of us look in the mirror and utter, “I am and will continue to be a majority of ONE!” I do not have to withdraw my taxes from the national treasury, to sustain my ‘majority of one.’ It is enough to hold firm to my conviction that both the absoluteness and the tyranny of the men in charge of the hate-infested flow of this offal stench of a new Styx, render it and them, eventually, but not without serious and dangerous and existentially risky opposition, of which I and everyone else can and will be an integral part, not merely obscene, but obsolete.

A vision of death, like the vision of the one deep into the contemplation of suicide, seems, to the one holding it, to be the only option available. And a single option, for both the one contemplating suicide as well as for the MAGA cult, is life-threatening, indeed more threatening that whatever horrendous circumstances might have prompted the openness to the single option. It is not only that Putin is an existential crisis for  the Ukrainians as well as for the Europeans, (while he believes the inverse, that NATO and western security forces inside Ukraine pose an existential crisis to and for Russia; it is not only that Netanyahu considers Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis and their founder and source of resources, Iran to be an existential threat to and for Israel, so too do Iran and Hamas and Hezbollah and the o consider Israel, with her nuclear weapons provided by the United States, an existential threat to their religion, and their way of life. Similarly, preying upon the exactly parallel template or archetype, the existential threat, as a raison d’etre, for political identity, has become the argument de jour on the political menu of the MAGA movement, given its beating of the drum of evil, hatred, bigotry and criminality identified with Biden, Obama, the fanatic-left judges, and anyone and everyone who opposes the presumed sanctity of the MAGA movement.

Hanging over this existentially-themed and obsessive-compulsive, political, military, economic and ethical-moral universal drama, is the one these high-decibel, lie-infested, and ego-dominated headlines and news stories ignore, fail to recognize and thereby declare immunity from, is the real existential crisis for which no one able to grab notice in the cacophony of all of these other ‘hubristic, heinous, bigoted, prejudiced and intransigent’ (and therefore absolute, in their own mind) voice). And that existential crisis is the rapidly evaporating, both literally and metaphorically, capacity of the planet to sustain life….human, animal, vegetable, oceanic, atmospheric and even potentially spiritual.

So long as we engage like drunken soldiers on the decks of a sinking ‘titanic’ in the also hubristically-founded, and metaphysically and empirically and philosophically insubstantial conviction that our ‘ship’ is unsinkable, like the men and women on the historical and literal Titanic, find ourselves hoisted on the petard of our own hubris. And while these current horrendous wars, and the rise of distrust in and respect for both individuals and institutions on which we must depend, not only for our survival but for our very healthy mental and emotional and spiritual state, swirl both about and within each of us, we fight in vain, for that touchstone that Thoreau confidently holds, as a majority of ONE…..

Even those men and women completely engrossed and even subsumed inside the debates within the various ‘opposing forces,’ state and non-state, legitimate and illegitimate, terrorist and non-terrorist, capitalist and non-capitalist, Christian and non-Christian, Muslim and non-Muslim, Jewish and non-Jewish, Western and non-Western, communist and non-communist, and thereby justifiying their work and their existence in holding fast to their respective ‘faith’…all of them remain faithless to the larger question of the fate of the planet.

And it is the question of being faithful or non-faithful that grips much of the rhetoric and much of the debate and the mind-set that is profiting the pharmaceuticals, the alcohol and tobacco companies, the weapon-producing oligopolies, the cyber-security behemoths, and the AI weaponization and monetizing of the oligarchs who are riding the current tide of cash….whose size and dimension, like another obliterating cloud, keeps us from seeing the underlying existential crisis again….

Like Leningin’s ants, we ‘herd’ ourselves on the right or the left, on the side of the muscular approach to Trump or the diplomatic, on the pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian, on the pro-Palestine or the pro-Israeli, on the Pro-Taiwan or the pro-China side of each of our perceived conflicts….and belonging, at whatever cost, is another of the driving imperatives for each of us….an imperative that brings with it another ‘faithlessness’ to our personal, majority of ONE….that sees the values and risks, the pro and the con arguments for each of the resolutions of our shared, and converging conflicts….and, we all have the obligation to recognize and respect, to realize and to accept our individual responsibility for, not a single conflict, or its resolution, but for a state of mind that embeds, and infests its collective  mind-set of hopelessness and despair that in the convergence of these horrendous crises, we will collectively be swallowed, like the co-ed on the beach of the Dominican by the cumulative and irresistible physical and inescapable force….

And fail to realize that it is the relinquishing of the force of our majority of one that enables and permits and even enhances the vehemence and the intractability of the forces of perceived existential crises…in the plural…when, we all know that keeping it simply stupid, is our own way to perceive and to participate in our lives.

I defer from obedient obsession to a singular person, any person fully conscious that no one person warrants such obeisance. I also defer from obsessive-compulsive adherence to a single religion, knowing that each has its merits and darknesses, its truths and its lies. I also defer from obsessive-compulsive conviction in my own and any other’s absolute access and consciousness of absolute “RIGHT” and am left in between the incompleteness and the ambiguities and the immoralities and blindnesses of each of the positions, especially those adopted as absolute  by any person, religion, political party, nation or ideology.

Let’s try to begin to defer from a public media, in any and all quarters, that espouses to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…in the full knowledge that no one, and no institution, and no politician and no clergy can or does tell the whole truth. We live in and with the shades of light and darkness that surround and accompany every single person and thing….and to live in a world that denies such a foundational cornerstone, is both foolhardy and unsustainable.

Thanks to Thoreau for introducing the majority of ONE….even to a sceptic of the right’s ideology of the small government….except when it comes to their apparent obsession to impose a hygienic and clinical sterility on the culture in which we are all attempting to continue to breathe.