If you want to know what the ancient Greeks believed, you should read The Iliad. If you want to know what Americans believe, you should go to the cheapest local barber.
I suppose if time travel were available to you, you could skip The Iliad and go straight to the ancient Greek version of barbers, which was probably a gymnasium, or maybe even just a barber. Koureus.
Probably skip the theorizers and the historians. They are too clouded by anachronistic thinking, ideological capture, and the effort to differentiate themselves from peers. The actual feelings of a place are best articulated by the people who live and die and work in that place. You get the best feel for it when they don’t think they’re being watched.
Maybe it’s something, too, that barbers touch and groom normal people, relaxing them into revealing the texture of their unconscious. Therapists listen more often to naval-gazers with expendable income trying to uncover “trauma” or force some other pseudo-rite. The barber holds the heads of ordinary people, speaking spontaneously while being petted, with no goal in mind, and so she naturally learns to talk to Americans in a pleasing way.
My barber is a Pentecostal woman named Tiffany. She charges $15, will sell you a cold Diet Coke, and keeps signs around that say things like “Only God can judge me.” If I were to bring her some kind of familial complaint, she would listen and tell me some variation of “you gotta do you,” or “they gotta do them.” If I’m nervous about something in the future, she’ll tell me to be myself. If I’m feeling ashamed of something that happened in the past, she’ll tell me not to worry so much about what people think of me.
The consistency of this advice, the inability to stray from it at all, is kind of incredible. You never hear anything about how you have a responsibility to your family or your nation over and beyond your personal freedoms. Only that you’re both entitled to your pursuit of happiness, and if you don’t agree, well, you’ll just have to agree to disagree.
Tiffany was cutting my hair cut just the other day when an idea uncurled out from my own unconscious: the dream of total freedom from others is the foundational lie, to put it bluntly, that our entire society is based around.
It also occurred to me that it is the central reason it’s so difficult for moderns to understand what’s going on in The Iliad: the ancient Greeks had no conception of this freedom from the constraints of social status. For them, as Simone Weil pointed out, that entire poem is about force. All men were equally subject to force. Men with a lot of power were able, using their temporarily elevated status, to smash through the barriers of other people, who bowed to them and conformed to their will. This power comes and goes by the whims of the gods, who pick who they like for reasons mostly unknown. Even the most powerful men will eventually submit, if not to the force of others, then to the force of nature, which will take them inevitably to Hades. For the ancient Greeks, force permeates every level of reality: social, biological, and natural.
Americans believe most deeply in total freedom from that force and all other limits, which blinds us to certain realities, like appreciating The Iliad. An American wouldn’t readily admit, say, that the mere proximity of one man to another is an imposition of his will. But this is made obvious when you realize that, for some reason, you cannot behave the same way in your bedroom when someone is in it.
In The Iliad, men with high status (conferred by physical prowess, beauty, providence, heredity, chance) are always, inevitably, compelled to exercise their power on their inferiors. Their swaggering unconcern and even cruelty toward the lives of others is almost identical with their power, and so cannot be relinquished in favor of “kindness.” Those without power are unbreakably confined by that lack of power, and may only muster a freedom to love their master.
It’s a very alien world from the world of my American barbershop. We have made the rules of this game taboo to speak of – uncool. To the sensitive, these games of power, and constraints by lack of power, are still very much happening all the time. We have simply made it our business to ignore and repress our love of power games. Despite hiding in plain sight, the central American lie is very stable because it produces these incredible castles in the sky.
The central lie of the ancient Greek world, I suppose, is that those with power are helpless to the fact that their power is impermanent. They’ll one day lose it, and whatever they wrought on their inferiors will inevitably be wrought on them. You can see hints of the coming gospel idea in Hector who, right before he is killed, says that Ares slays those who would slay.
The American tradition is, of course, downstream from the Christian one, but with an important twist on the core idea. The American idea is that, like Jesus, you are free from the constraints of worldly power. But for some reason, here in America, you get to do this without doing the one thing that he did that was so radical: submitting yourself totally to limitations. Without first becoming a slave, in other words. Without rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s.
Americans are secretly unified under this one big unspoken lie. They just have various definitions of what exactly it means. Parts of the conservative right believe American freedom means the freedom to be a pagan killer in the marketplace and a Christian in the living room. The freedom here is the freedom to live or die by your success or failure in this secondary, abstracted power struggle for money. Only your “soul” is somehow divided from this struggle, often symbolized by the unconditional love of family or going to heaven after you die.
Parts of the liberal left see American freedom more as the freedom of your identity to break all biological and social constraints, to be forgiven of all shame, and to be forever cradled in a safety net of unconditional merciful care, which they believe to be the ordinary state of nature, if it weren’t for the greed and power struggles of those on the right.
Even though these two share pretty much the same intellectual heritage, they are mutually reinforcing adversaries. The right sees the left as the perennial, resentful losers who refuse to accept the freedom of their fate. The left sees the right as the colonizers forever spoiling the otherwise all-caring state of nature. They are unconsciously united in their disbelief in any rigid social responsibilities and immutable hierarchies that were self-evident to the Greek progenitors of our society.
I also don’t want to make it seem like I’m standing outside the American belief structure with my hands on my hips. I am myself an American, and I happen to love this country, despite everything I’ve said so far. Even now, I am practicing my freedom to observe what I see and write it down, outside of any social pressures that might try to convince me not to do that. In fact, I’m writing this in perfect privacy so that I can cultivate the clarity of my own will. The mere existence of someone nearby, watching me work, would make it almost impossible for me to do what I’m doing.
For this tendency, Americans are history’s greatest creatives and inventors. Despite our propensity for delusion, we have a simultaneous capacity to occasionally prove our delusions correct and make them delusions no more. I’m reminded of that 1903 New York Times article that scathingly suggested man-made flight was one to ten million years away (how do you even come up with those numbers?) The sentiment behind it was to viciously shame people like the Wright brothers, who were trying to take off from the ground not only physically but symbolically, and soar away from natural constraints.
Once you start seeing this, you see it everywhere. Even in places you might think of as trite, like the famous song from High School Musical, which is all about soaring and flying and reaching for every star in heaven, breaking free from social expectations: a desire greater than hope, greater than faith.
At the same time, America is changing right now. There’s a new group of people, not-so-lovingly referred to as chuds, or red-pillers, who make it their business to re-identify all the forgotten and ignored constraints of force: how CEOs tend to be tall, how tall rich men tend to get all the women, how the beautiful and attractive are conferred more status. How, in some ways, there is nothing you can do to overcome these forces. Anything that suggests otherwise is “cope.” This is the deepest American taboo, and these people are breaking it out in the open. It makes sense that, in the same general cohort you have what are called vitalists, sometimes even self-proclaimed neopagans. These people are, again, realizing what was obvious to the ancient Greeks: power.
We know how this story goes. The worldly circumstances of force and power of the pagans are brutal, real, and true. Also: those who live by that sword will die by that sword. So we may begin to correct for the central American delusion and say: in fact, if we’re being honest with ourselves, the thing to do with whatever power you happen to have is to willingly give it up. The thing to do with your lack of power is to realize that you’re actually blessed by it. By doing that, you invert the newly obvious again pagan rule that what goes around comes around, thereby sowing the seeds of your reward.
Societies based on this idea have received their reward by becoming high-trust and therefore very wealthy. We live in the products of that in the post-Christian West. The problem is that once you receive the reward, you have to give it up again, or it will be the very means of your downfall. Through historical amnesia, we’ve forgotten that responsibility to willingly give up our personal power, even going so far as relinquishing the power to continue to live. How much we’re willing to suffer a regression to pagan battles for power as a result of that half-forgetting is really up to us. How many times do we have to die tragic little deaths on our own sword before we realize we have to be able both to wield it but also not use it? That will be left to the peccadilloes of history to come.
Getting away from this hard-to-picture civilizational scale to make a smaller observation: Americans are bad listeners. We’re famously loud, insensitive to the more delicate status games of Europe (who have a more sublimated memory of their pagan history), and so we tend to stomp indiscriminately all over the place. That is our era in miniature: it is a submission to the power of the person speaking and to allow their state of being to wash over you, as if they are momentarily your master. To avoid this unconscious humiliation, when you tell most Americans what you’re going through, they go glassy-eyed, unable to let your story land on them, and then spout off some American cliché about being yourself, or you do you, or self-care. Whatever defense mechanism works for them.
The Americans I know who actually can listen tend to more often be the leftist rebellious artist types. They, at least, believe that the suffering of the victimized individual is what produces the art that overcomes tyranny. They just also have a false belief that everything would be perfect if they were free to express their true “identity” in its freest manifestation. If the suits and the money men and the power brokers would just get out of their way, this world would become a natural utopia. That is unfortunate for them because it creates an external enemy that they never have to submit themselves to, and thereby forever staves off their own best transformations. Still, I personally find it easier to become good friends with these types, because at least they have the ability to suffer and therefore to truly know anything. They are usually the most Christ-like Westerners, even though most of them would never consider themselves Christian, because they associate Christendom with American power culture.
Even though I consider myself a traditionalist Catholic, I have much more hope for the future of the American dream in the hands of rebels and atheists and artists. They’re already attempting the hardest part, which is to suffer to bring about what is good. On the extreme margins (mostly that you see only online,) they are also capable of extreme acts of evil. But the last step toward full integration is easier for a normal lib than it is for their power-obsessed counterparts.
We are all subject to caring what people think of us, to wanting power, to wanting to be part of some inner circle. We should not only accept it, but lower ourselves to the point of slavery. Instead of feeling resentful toward an entire aspect of reality, garner the courage to navigate it in all its imperfections. To love the people, the suits and the freaks included. To submit ourselves to society and church and family and to refuse to defect even when there is tyranny.
That’s how you practice the truer freedom. It will force you to completely relinquish all the safety granted by power and status, even the taboo to never mention it. Even the power to keep the people we love safe, which is maybe even more difficult than relinquishing it for ourselves.
I loved this one. The intro really grabbed me.
I read this as a sailing metaphor. The Force of Tides and the Choice of Winds. Americans, especially artist/atheist, love the wind but often lack direction. In a way they are correct, the tide is holding them back. They need to tack and jibe. The tide just keeps moving in and out from the shore like a Greek wheel of fortune. In a storm the tide dominates and tosses you about like a dingy. To fight the tide you need 50 people with some oars on a Penteconter. But you don’t do it alone. Those who can do both will get where they want to go.