The Sage Observer

To Begin With

          I am compelled to share this with you as I feel so very impressed with it as well as with its author, Mr. Gerry Spence. It is the introduction to his book, From Freedom to Slavery, copyrighted in 1993 and published by St. Martin’s Press and which I highly recommend to you. I hope you will enjoy it as well as I do. His introduction begins as follows:

“Writing a book about a lofty subject such as freedom is like trying to jump from rock to rock across the creek without getting your feet wet. No matter how you plan your course, you are likely to slip off into the water somewhere. The choice, of course, is whether one wishes to stay on the bank with dry feet. Or take the risk of wet feet to get to the other side.

Doctors called upon to attend the sick cannot prescribe a cure unless they are first able to diagnose the illness. Even before that, they must detect that the patient is ill. In the case of our freedoms, I can confidently say the patient is in grave danger. Having said so, and should you agree in whole or in part, we have, together, taken the first step toward the cure.

As for the solutions, there are only two kinds—those from outside the self and those from within. The first suggests that we destroy our enemies, that we manipulate or neutralize them, that we discover detours around them, that we suffer their impositions against us, or, at last, that we even love them. In any event, the solution acknowledges the existence of outside forces that deter our progress and impede our happiness. On the other hand, there persists the idea—one with which I am in agreement—that solutions are mainly matters of the self, that power vested in others is often irrelevant to our freedom, that the only change essential for the betterment of the human condition is to change within, that we are the fountainhead of power, and that, therefore, we need not free the world—we need only free ourselves. Yet I have never been an exclusionist. It makes no more sense to argue that all solutions should fall into one category or the other than to argue that a mustard plaster is the proper remedy for every ailment.

The problem, however, is not so much in finding solutions as in making the solutions work. Any splinter can cause a fatal infection. This being so, one also knows one can never detect all the splinters that make up the smoothest stick. Marx, for example, hated the exploitation of the masses, but his solutions, however corrupted in their application, resulted in the enslavement of whole nations. Christ also had a good idea—that we love one another. But his followers, attempting to realize his simple, perhaps perfect remedy, disagreed on what they thought were crucial points—whether they should hold their meetings on Saturday or Sunday—whether members of the flock at baptism should be nearly drowned to wash away their sins, or whether a few drops of water on the head would suffice. In the end, his followers proved to be strong on organization, unsurpassed on dogma, supreme on sophistry, but not much on love. They fought endless wars in his name, murdered hordes of the innocent, burned countless women at the stake as witches, bashed in the heads of “heathen” Indian children, and left the world riddled with guilt and fear.

Freedom in America, as bountiful and precious as it is, has always been a strange conglomerate of the divine and the fanciful. Understanding freedom in America is like listening to a one-armed piano player. His one arm performs not only its assigned task, but has painfully attempted to undertake the function of the missing limb. He plays the melody with the magnificent frills and rolls of the virtuoso. He represents all of the higher virtues of the species: He is resourceful, creative, vigorous, and he is very brave. In listening, our minds provide for us what our ears do not—the music of the other hand. But after we assess his performance, as admirable as it has been, we know that something is, indeed, missing.

Freedom in America works best for those who can afford it. As the fellow said in The Grapes of Wrath, “You’re just as free as you’ve got Jack to pay for it.” It is not as much an idea as it is a commodity. It is not as much a liberated state of being as it is an item on the shelf that, along with the purchaser, may be purchased. It is not as much a right as a component of commerce.

The danger, of course, is that we have become the purchasers of the fable of freedom. When we vigorously argue to our neighbors that Americans are free, our neighbors will likely assert that they “buy” that. Having bought the fable, it belongs to us, and we fight to keep it like howling apes protecting their trinkets and their tinfoil.

On the other hand, some of us enjoy a state of freedom that never enters even the dreams of those in many other cultures. I sit warm and comfortably at my desk recording those thoughts. My stomach is full—too full. I do not fear intrusions from brown-shirted agents of the government. If I make minimal efforts at compliance with the rules that preserve the power structure, I will likely be left alone, even if I criticize the power structure, I am essentially free to rant and rave and to emit all manner of noxious noise. It is this dichotomy that serves as both our pride and our poison.

Today there are, as indeed, there have always been, insidious, enslaving forces at work in America. Today’s emerging tyranny emanates from a New King, from a nonliving power center composed at its core of monolithic corporate entities encased and protected by endless layers of governmental bureaucracies. The primary state of the New King is to convert all rights, all human energy , all goals and, at least, all humans into fungible commodities, for the New King exists solely for commerce and its life’s blood, its green blood, its money—and it singular mission is profit. The New King’s principal means of control is the media that sells us the myths of freedom, that, when we doubt, reassures us we are free, and that programs us and our children to accept the notion that all human function, all human desires, indeed, even immortality itself can, at last be satisfied at the marketplace.

I am not against religion—nor am I against commerce. I am, however, reluctant to offer solutions. If the Church has anything to do with it, those who offer solutions outside the scriptures will be condemned to eternal hell. If government has anything to do with them any sound idea will be consumed in the bureaucracy, and if the idea should somehow escape the grinding teeth of its machinery, the author will be labeled an enemy of the state and disemboweled in one fashion or another. If corporate America has anything to do with it, any ideas that threaten its power will be branded as leftist, or commie, or un-American, and the author of such reform banished as a heretic against the most sacred of all religions in America, Free Enterprise.

At last, I have tired of the issue as well as these arguments. If this collection of free-floating thoughts about freedom is to have any efficacy, it will come from freely saying what is on my mind, saying it as well as I can, saying it in such a way that satisfies me, or even amuses me; and if a solution seems to appear, well why not give it recognition It does no one any good bounding around in the mind’s soupy fog where, in all probability, it will eventually be cast into the trash pile of the magnificent and the forgotten. And if no solutions seem at hand, well, I was never born to solve all of the world’s problems, and those who tried were either fools or martyrs.

Sometimes it is easier for a poor man to tolerate his corns than to go barefoot and discard the shoes that cause them. Despite the existence of sharp rocks and cockleburs, there is something magical about a boy’s barefoot freedom. If only we could convince the world’s leaders not to walk in each other’s shoes but, instead, to meet and to talk to each other in their bare feet’ likely, the people, as well as the earth, would benefit immensely. I think, therefore, I shall walk bare-footed herein. I think I shall walk wherever my feet will take me. I hope you’ll come too."

                                                                                     Gerry Spence

Jackson Hole, Wyoming

                                                                                July 4, 1993

Gerry Spence’s book is available on Amazon.com.

Ronald Miller

mtss86@comcast.net