The Language of War

I was watching this great documentary last night about the way the NBA handled the pandemic crisis and the urgent social justice issues that arose during their emergency procedures out of the savage assassination of George Floyd on the streets of America. It’s called The Day Sports Stood Still if you are interested in seeing it for yourself. I enjoy sports documentaries. In fact, I prefer watching sports-related content more than any other thing since all other content (unless it’s an Ingmar Bergman film or something) is generally vacuous and designed primarily to keep me glued to my screen for as long as possible while addling and manipulating my mind and turning me into a braindead consumerist zombie.

For the most part, I watch football. Not soccer, football (for some reason people always ask for clarification). And in the football universe, I watch primarily Tom Brady games because I’m kind of obsessed with him. Some people who, in my opinion, are too focused on their political ideations apparently object to Tom Brady but I don’t see him as a political figure, a sports figure, a white person with money, or even a Trump supporter. I see him as the full embodiment of certain characteristics and archetypal frequencies that I am trying to constellate within my own consciousness. These are discipline, focus, determination, persistence, passion for one’s craft, unflagging commitment, sacrificing ten million ways one can succumb to self-indulgence and laziness, winning, and all-around entrenched perspicacity (my favorite new term, coined by yours truly, for the no-bullshit way of getting things done).

To an outside reader who knows nothing about the spiritual dimensions of archetypal frequencies, it could seem as though my aim is to succeed according to current definitions of success, as though I believe that winning means accessing the same rewards as those that Tom Brady has. After all, he is rich and famous — two things everyone hankers for with slavish desire. But no, that’s not it for me, for me, it’s about having the same drive and commitment but directing that frequency of focused power and determination toward spiritual and creative imperatives, cultivating a single-minded devotion to my craft, to my soul’s true purpose, which, in my case, is about becoming a superlative artist, scholar, writer, and DJ.

For a long time over the last few years, I would sit each night and watch entire seasons of Tom Brady games night after night without having any idea why I was doing it. I’m a full-blown “alternative” artist and intellectual so friends and family were bemused by the obsession, it seemed so out of character. It took a while for me to realize that it was Tom Brady’s archetypal significance with which I was obsessed, or rather, some part of my unconscious psyche was obsessed. At the time, I could not admit to myself that I wanted to become successful at what it is that I do, seeing success as a bad thing to strive for, something dirty, a desire befouled with the predilections of the empire and its violent corporate puppet masters. But it slowly dawned on me that success has deeper definitions, too, and that it is possible to win the Super Bowl of your own personal fate if you can only commit to it with unwavering devotion. This means also accepting and loving all of your life and seeing every event that has occurred in it as part of the total package of purpose and destiny. In the world of esoteric knowledge, this kind of success is also known as magic. The simple truth is that with enough focus and determination and persistence, you can literally make anything that you want to take shape and form in the material world — hey, presto! In other words, you can realize your dreams, but it takes hard work, focused desire, unshakable consistency, and time.

Turning now to what it is that I like to do, it goes something like this: I like to expose hypocrisy and affectations and pervasive unconsciousness around cultural issues. Not because I am mean-spirited but because I believe honesty and clear-eyed vision are prerequisites for real transformative growth. Otherwise, change will come, but it will not be what we hoped. In the documentary I told you about there was a lot of footage showing African American activists demanding that the evil empire of white supremacy in this country be dismantled so that people of color can live freely without being hunted like animals in the streets by savage racist policemen. I completely empathize with this cause and write frequently, not specifically about race issues, but about the archetypal dimensions of a global patriarchy that has had a stranglehold on humanity for millennia of which consistent police brutality toward POC is one effect and symptom.

Here’s my beef: I object to the use of a raised fist as a symbol of freedom in social justice movements. A fist is a symbol of war, a symbol of fighting and violence. It is not a symbol of peace, it is not a symbol of freedom, it is not a symbol of justice. A fist, raised or otherwise, is a symbol of “might makes right,” it is a symbol of force-backed domination, it is a symbol of warfare and of the supremacy of one group over another — in short, it is a symbol of oppression. Now, why would a group of people who are ostensibly seeking peace and justice and freedom use a symbol of war to argue their case? I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a photo of Martin Luther King, Jr. with a raised fist in the air. That’s because he was singularly devoted to nonviolent resistance as the most judicious way to defy tyranny and oppression. Because the moment you have expressed your views in the same language used by your oppressor, you have become the same as the oppressor and no longer stand on any moral high ground no matter how just your cause.

To me, this is the danger of such movements: the way they unconsciously use the same language of war and utilize the same tactics of war and domination to gain ascendancy for their cultural and political aspirations as a group. All this does is remind one sharply of the old song by The Who which says, “Have you met the new boss? Same as the old boss.” In other words, the freedom seekers, using the language, tactics, and psychic dimensions of warfare and domination, simply become the new oppressors. And I believe this is the silent unconscious hypocrisy of the movement to which opponents are responding with such a voracious appetite.

We can never transform hate with more hate. And in any movement toward evolution and transformation, love and peace have got to be the highest priorities. This means consciously refusing to use symbols of hatred and warfare, consciously refusing to constellate the language of war by saying we will “fight” for this and “fight” for that. Fighting is the way of the empire, the way of the patriarchy, the way of the negative masculine archetype who responds to everything new with fear and resistance. But this truth is not yet apparent to our illustrious freedom seekers. There isn’t a centralized message of determined peace and love. There is a mash-mash of justifiably angry hordes who bravely tweet their dissatisfaction and ruin people’s lives willy-nilly as a way to satiate their lust for revenge. For this is another secret no one wants to speak of but that certain categories of people in this country secretly fear — that there is a palpable lust for vengeance and it simmers in the unconscious shadow of the American cultural psyche. Perhaps this is why, despite all intelligent arguments to the contrary, the raised fist continues to be the symbol of choice for black activists and the second amendment continues to be the number one cause for the whites (as Dave Chappelle hilariously calls them). And the medium-range people just want to buy stuff and watch TV without being bothered.

Having said my beef, I must also recognize and acknowledge that within every subculture and especially within the movement for black lives, there are meaningful and inspiring changes taking shape. This is another reason I admire sports figures so much. The entire sports world of this country has taken up this cause and many powerful people are working to effect significant change in the laws and systems that currently protect police savagery and violence toward POC. Serious change is also being sought in other dimensions of cultural experience including education, housing, and the right to vote.

At the end of the day, though, it’s important that we keep our wits about us and make sure we aren’t unconsciously constellating the dark side and its hateful imperatives when we confront and seek to transform old systems of oppression. We must not use the same tactics and simply become the new oppressors. This takes a lot of commitment, resolve, focus, and determination. It takes maturity, a kind of maturity that has dissolved overly emotional self-indulgent Utopian fantasies, a maturity that can hold and endure more complexity.