INTEGRAL POLITICS

Exterminism

The 2004 Election established a new stage of American-led Global Empire, beyond Fascism to what is best described as Exterminism, because the Bush Republican agenda is not merely the conquest and exploitation of the entire world, but rather, The End Of The World or Armageddon, either by causing World War 3 or catastrophic ecological collapse. This agenda cannot be adequately explained in terms of selfishness, greed, or the endless pursuit of money. Something much more irrational and pathological is going on in the White House, Congress, Courts, Pentagon, the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, and throughout American society. A self-destructive mentality has taken over the American political process, the course of world history, and the fate of the earth, and if politically aware people do not understand this, and respond appropriately to it, then we might as well say that we want to die because that is definitely what is going to happen to all of us, sooner or later.

The Republican Party is getting away with terrible things, spearheading world-destruction, because it is supported by tens of millions of seriouly psychologically damaged people who are seeking, consciously and unconsciously, deliverance or release from personal suffering through political and social suicide. These people vote not only against their own economic interests, but also against their own survival, and the survival or biological interests of everyone. What is the underlying pathology that has produced such people, and pushed Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Delay, Frist, and many crazies to the top--and the planet and all its life forms to the brink of catastrophe?

In a word, fear is propelling us toward global disaster, but in order to understand it we must distinguish between rational fear and irrational fear. If you are in Sudan or Iraq right now, then your fear is rational because of imminent danger. Irrational fear, on the other hand, is the fear of something that is not there, or a gross exaggeration of something that is there; it is a misinterpretation of reality. Another term for irrational fear is paranoia, and the inner mechanism of paranoia is projection (what is inside is experienced as coming from the outside). This means that paranoids are afraid of themselves. What is it that so many Americans fear about themselves?

Paranoid people fear their own erotic nature because they have adopted through force (traumatic socialization) a false morality, an anti-sexual morality that persecutes and punishes them for expressing or even acknowledging the sexual dimension of human nature. Therefore, they oppose on the political level anything and everything that tempts, stimulates, releases sexuality. Look at the recent presidential election: the political issues that mobilized Republicans and many Independents for example; anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-sex education, anti-Hollywood, anti-drugs, anti-art, anti-evolution--had to do, directly or indirectly, with opposing sexual freedom. Those with “spines of tempered steel” (to quote Zell Miller) are threatened by the breakdown of “the traditional family” as the bedrock institution for the rigid self-discipline, self-limitation, and self-denial of sex, and they are waging and escalating a cultural war against the natural-erotic self. But it will not work because the more a person represses sexual desire, the more it grows, distorting and twisting the resisting personality into hatred and madness. Now many Americans have been made mentally ill by the accumulating effects of self-hatred (whose origin is hatred of the body, especially erotic desire) to the point that they are ready to die, want to die, believe that they deserve to die (along with everyone else).

Thanks to the “genius” of Karl Rove and the Republican propaganda machine, the sexually sick have been politicized, republicanized, and neoconned. War and hate-propaganda appeal to those who have sexual wounds that never heal because it offers them a Final Solution to their suffering. In the grip of a sadistic morality, and not having the strength/courage to improve their own miserable lives, many are drawn to the indirect and coded Republican strategy of social suicide, called the War On Terror, which is nothing but a detour to one‘s own death via the death of everyone. The War On Terror must be understood, at its source, as a war against the true self, whose core is Eros, and it can only be won (in a morbid way) through Exterminism.

There is an important difference between ignorant people and sick (or stupid) people. Ignorant people are “capable” of learning the truth from facts, information, and rational arguments; once the truth is presented to them, they begin to internalize it and change/evolve. The sick, on the other hand, have an emotional blockage to the truth, and no amount of evidence or facts will change them. Severe sexual wounding has filled them with hatred, closed their heart, and once the heart is closed, then the mind shuts down, and cannot process new and better information. Real intelligence must be informed by feelings and love. The Republican Party has become a gathering place for stone-hearted ideologues, with leaders who are determined to achieve the impossible goal of self-conquest at all costs. The American presidential election of 11/2, 2004 (not 9/11) was a critical threshold in American history (and world history): the day that self-destructive people consolidated and expanded control over the lives of everyone.

In response, Democrats, Greens, Socialists, Communitarians, and everyone above Republicans on the evolutionary scale of consciousness should form a coalition of the politically awake, with a dual strategy: 1) we need to develop and practice a politics of emergency (electoral politics, petitions, demonstrations, educational films, political conversations, and other acts of reform and resistance) that removes the Republican Party from political power, and 2) we need to discuss and begin a long-range visionary agenda that transcends Party politics altogether.

With Republican self-loathers now pulling the political and economic levers, life in America and elsewhere is going to get ugly fast. Be prepared to work harder and longer for less, for an ascetic culture with a vengeance, with no appeal or sympathetic ear in the corridors of power. Squeezing the joy out of life, reducing its quality, is the Republican plan for converting everyone to the worldview that human nature is “seriously flawed” (as the patron saint of the neocons, Leo Strauss, said), or that the world is “a dark and forbidding place” (as the conservative columnist, George Will, said), leading eventually to the collective conclusion that life is not worth living. The evangelical spirit of capitalism, making the earth a living hell, is the self-fulfilling prophecy of the Apocalypse.

No amount of rational argumentation will influence people who are caught in the guilt-ridden, self-destructive eschatology of original sin, Atonement, and the Rapture because they are mentally ill, not ignorant, and they are bent toward taking everyone down in Glorious Last Days. With nuclear weapons in America still on hair-trigger alert, launch-on-warning, there is real danger of a miscalculated, unauthorized nuclear war, but on a deeper level a nuclear or ecological holocaust has already been born in the deranged mind of Bush Americans, and if we “stay the course” then The End Of The World will not be an accident.

Free Love

Global Empire--which is headquartered in Washington D.C, not because it has any allegiance to U.S. interests, but because it has a reliance on the U.S. military--is not primarily about efficiency and productivity and the accumulation of money (Hitler was not simply seeking wealth), and it is clearly not about improving the quality of life on earth. Rather, it is about dominating, exploiting, and torturing others, about terrorizing the world by removing all safety nets (land, village, community, commons), about a transnational elite projecting self-misery and self-torment around the globe in a futile effort to escape from (the sexual dimension of) themselves.

This sadistic New World Order is resisted by sane and loving people everywhere, but it is spreading over the world because it is the organized expression of massive psychosexual damage in the most powerful country in the world--namely, America. Selfishness and greed, exemplified by those at the top, are running rampant throughout American society, and they will continue to grow and intensify because they are symptoms, not causes. What‘s happening is that more and more of innate human love and compassion for others and the Earth is being withdrawn, and turned inward, into egoism, in an endless and wasteful effort to neutralize growing self-hatred that is the result of an American anti-sexual Cultural War (dating back to our Puritan beginnings). A cure for selfishness and greed requires that we heal the underlying pathology of self-contempt for erotic human nature.

The present political problem of exterminism goes deeper than the enormous political ignorance in America, and is rooted in severe sexual sickness (brought to this continent by the Puritans) that twists and distorts human beings, producing hateful/aggressive rulers who are now honing the economy into a sophisticated weapon for punishing “the people”, who “deserve” nothing but hard work, poverty, vengeance, and death. This sickness badly infects the Republican Party, who has made the present Government--and its various branches, especially the executive branch--a merciless machine, driven by mean-spiritedness, for targeting, tracking, torturing (for profit and fun) citizens and non-citizens, at home and abroad. The Bush Torture Machine, in an endless search for fraud and dissent, is threatening, prosecuting, incarcerating, and killing more and more people everywhere.

Democrats are naiive in thinking that Transnational Corporate Capitalism can solve the worldwide problems it creates, and in trying to reason or cooperate with self-destructive and hateful people (mainly the Religious Right) who have no moral principles, whose words are babble, and who only care about winning (their own wrong way) at the ultimate cost of losing everything. Nevertheless, I recognize the emergency-brake value of Democratic electoral politics, but Democrats need to recognize that it is a losing deal to be rational, fair, decent, accommodating, civil, trusting, and play by the rules with opponents who lie, cheat, steal, bully, destroy, and twist the rules and laws. It is necessary for Democrats and all concerned/aware people to fight, to use aggression, in the service of life (against those who use aggression in the service of death), if we are going to be effective in the arena of electoral politics. Beyond Party battles, I offer the following Vision that throws light on the sexual root of the political madness that is raging today.

Look up at the clear night sky! The free play of two cosmic forces, Eros and Thanatos, Love and Hate, Attraction and Repulsion, Intimacy and Distance, sustains harmony among the heavenly bodies and evolves the beauty, wisdom, and goodness of the universe. What is the message or lesson for human association or society that is written in the cosmos? We know that human society is a microcosm of this great celestial order, and that we have fallen out of balance with the rest of Nature. What must we do in order to become part of the Universal Harmony again?

Everyone recognizes that friendship cannot be mandated or legislated, that it arises naturally, spontaneously, one person at a time, and that it is possible and desirable to have many friends, on different levels of communication, conversation, and commitment. The hope of peace on earth, and peace with the earth, has a lot to do with spreading friendship around the world, but I do not believe this ideal will ever be realized (enough to save the world) until we acknowledge that Yin and Yang, the feminine spirit and the masculine spirit, are also cosmological principles and/or forces, which change the balancing point between men and women by adding sexuality to the mix. We should not pursue a vision of world peace and friendship that ignores, minimizes, or misunderstands the sexual-polarity of human association.

My heavenly vision, and long-range political solution, is Free Love between man and woman. By free love I mean sexual love that does not restrict itself to one person at a time. It means holding oneself open to the possibility of sexually loving more than one, and taking that voyage when the opportunity arrives; it means taking each man/woman relationship on its own terms, as far as it will go, as far as it wants to go, including sexuality, until it finds its own point of equilibrium between Love and Hate, Intimacy and Distance. This is the Way to sustain rational relations with one another and with the earth. The message of evolution is that each being finds its balancing point with all other beings, according to the laws of nature, including Yin--Yang, creating a self-balancing dynamic whole in which each being is what it is in terms of the totality of self-regulating relationships.

Human beings must freely associate, form, and bond, including Yin-Yang sexual energies, or we disturb the natural order of human society, our alignment or agreement with the logic and love of the cosmos. Human society, with its sexual-polarity, must freely arrange itself, or we will not achieve a harmonious community, and without a harmonious community we will not reach consensus on the political level because sexual frustrations, conflicts and hostilities spill over into the major areas of life, work and government. In other words, the ideal of friendship will remain an empty ideal if we do not understand that free love is part of the original architecture of human togetherness, and that we must allow sexuality between men and women to work itself out, according to inherent interests desires, laws, or we will never build good government, real democracy, or a true Republic because if we do not first put our sexual lives in proper order, then politics will collapse on a faulty foundation. Out of the fundamental harmony of a sexually balanced civil society will come political intelligence and wisdom.

Respond, as much as you can, to all heavenly bodies orbiting around you. That‘s how the suns and moons and planets behave toward one another, pushing and pulling everything into a vibrating, pulsating, interconnected totality. Of course it is not possible to love everyone with the same intensity and completeness (with some people a simple nod or smile, or even silent toleration, is enough), but each man/woman relationship has its natural sexual closeness and distance, and we must have the courage to seek it, and go there, without interference from custom, convention, or imposed morality. Friendship is always, at bottom, a relationship between two people, but everyone knows that it is not socially desirable, not community building, for each person to have only one friend. Rather, each person is permitted and encouraged to have a diversity of friends, each one created on its own unique terms, as deeply as possible, with no outside direction or definition. If sexual love was free to follow this path, like friendship, then we would have discovered the secret ingredient in a self-balancing social constellation (of friends and lovers), and secured the social foundation for rational discourse and action.

If there was only Love, then the Big Bang would not have occurred, and the world would collapse (into undifferentiated Oneness), and evolution would have to begin again; if there was only Hate, then the world would fragment, scatter, and fly apart. The Great Harmony is a balance between the forces of Attraction and Repulsion, Contraction and Expansion, Integration and Disintegration. Free Love is the mystery or secret of the universe, and if human beings would sexually love who we want, when we want, in the way that we want, as much as we want, instead of imposing artificial constraints, or false morality, on love, then the gravity of love (containing the anti-gravitational force of hate or flight) would create a tight and intricate web of human connections in which we would not have to struggle for political consensus because we would already basically have it.

The first and foremost criticism that is raised against free love is that it harms children, but actually it is best for children because the nuclear family is too small a world for the development of the vast potential of children. The nuclear family limits childhood reality to the overbearing influence of two adult perspectives, making it nearly impossible for the child to escape from prejudice, ignorance, narrowness, and parental unconsciousness. The wounds of the parents are visited on the children, and the cycle of the neurotic family is perpetuated from one generation to the next, which slows down the evolution of the human species tremendously. Free love makes intimate communities (like tribes), rather than isolated families, the center of childhood upbringing, exposing the child to many viewpoints, expanding his/her consciousness, increasing the opportunities for sanity and self-realization.

A second objection that is raised against free love is that it will not work because human beings are competitive, jealous and possessive creatures, but actually it is monogamy that causes these problems because it makes us fearful that if s/he loves someone other than me, then s/he cannot also love me. If your concept of love is limited, then that creates jealousy and possessiveness because you are afraid of loss, abandonment and loneliness, but if you “see” that it is possible to love more than one, then you will not fear abandonment and loneliness when love overflows to include others. Free love makes intimate networks (like tribes), rather than fragmented couples, the center of personal life and love, exposing the adult to a diversity of potential lovers, broadening the horizon of intimate contact, communication, and knowledge, increasing the opportunities for security and satisfaction.

Another criticism leveled against free love is that there is not enough time to love more than one, but of course love concerns quality, not quantity. Eliminating the boredom of monogamy alone would provide more than enough time for at least a few additional lovers, and then there are those habits, routines, hobbies, and fantasies that could be replaced, for almost no money, with deep and thrilling and enlightening sexual love adventures. There will never be enough time for co-dependent individuals because every gesture or sign of independence is seen as a minimization or devaluation of their relationship, and there will never be enough time for someone who is waiting for the one and only perfect lover. Such people cannot get enough love no matter how much they get because they misunderstand the nature of love. To these people I say: contemplate the heavens and let your personal life become a feeling and thoughtful expression of the Will, intention, and intelligence of the Universe!

The Great Refusal

The development of global financial markets and transnational corporations is bringing World Disaster, but this does not mean that there is no significant difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties. The Republican Party is nothing but the political arm of corporate globalization on U.S. terms, while the Democratic Party has some wider human and ecological interests and concerns that will “slow down“ the process, and upon this “small” difference hangs the fate of the earth and its inhabitants because we need “time” to evolve fundamental lifestyle changes to American-led world capitalism. Only by slowing down the Corporate-Republican agenda (which is speeding us directly to hell), with the assistance of the Democratic Party, can we secure the essential time to resolve the Deep Crisis.

Party-politics or electoral politics is the politics of emergency: it‘s about putting out fires, treating the symptoms, staying alive, while we develop an Alternative to being burned and buried by a nuclear fireball or Global Warming. It postpones disaster, but it will not save the world unless we also begin, very soon, a deep, long-range eco-social movement that transforms the established reality (in the available time given to us by the politics of emergency). If we don‘t root out the original cause of U.S. global hegemony, then this social disease will grow even stronger until it kills all of Life on earth.

Resurrecting the Founding Fathers is not the remedy because Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, wanted to pursue their own entrepreneurial endeavors with a minimum of government interference, so they set up, under the influence of Adam Smith, a free-market society in which the American political system enables the unlimited accumulation of wealth in the private sector by removing natural and man-made obstacles. To borrow a metaphor form Calvin Coolidge, the country was to be carried comfortably down the river by the current or flow of Capital, and the function of government is merely to put out an oar where there is any danger of it drifting into the bank. Unfortunately, the Founding Fathers saw government as the major threat to (commercial) freedom, with no understanding that the major threat to (human) freedom is the concentration and centralization of wealth in private hands, and there is nothing in the constitution, as they envisioned it, to correct this fatal flaw of no positive role for government in the re-distribution of wealth (which is why it has now reached obscene proportions).

We need a completely new American Experiment that does not replace British Empire with American Empire, but rather, restores the tribal wisdom to see (immediately and intuitively) the atrocities of “free enterprise” (or what Smith called “a New Order of the Ages” that is inscribed on the back of each dollar bill). In the jungle towns of Ecuador it is known that Global Empire destroys forests, pollutes rivers, pushes indigenous cultures to the brink of extinction. The neighboring people of Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, and Bolivia, do not want to be integrated into a worldwide system of commerce that privatizes key sectors of the economy: energy, water, sanitation, transportation, utilities, and communications, because they know that “liberating the market, deregulation, trade liberalization” degrades the planet and polarizes it into the super-rich and the global proletarian, i.e. into the masters of the universe, the global ruling class, and those who suffer tighter and tighter austerity measures until they die from poverty, disease, and war. The whole system of world capitalism is so unnatural, so contrary to human nature, that it is resisted by the overwhelming majority of (sane) people around the world (including Iraqis, who oppose the globalization and privatization of their state enterprises) but not in America, where about one-half of the voting population supports it, brags about it, fights for it, and goes to war for it, not mainly out of ignorance, for the facts and tracks of the Great Beast are everywhere, but due to mental illness from the cumulative over-restriction of sexual freedom, more than anything else, that closes the heart and mind. Once the heart and mind are closed, due to sexual wounding and repression, then people stop learning from the consequences of their actions and end up supporting, with a lot of hatred and resentment, destructive policies and objectives. If we are to defeat the American rise of the psychologically damaged, who are using voting-power to harm themselves and everyone in the world, then we need a new American Political Experiment/Movement of Sexual Liberation (that ultimately leads to the creation of a tribal constitution, a discussion of which exceeds the scope of this essay) because the over-restriction of human sexuality to the culminating point of paranoid insanity is the cause of Exterminism.

The merger of the Religious Right and the Neocons is predicable because they are both reactionary movements to the permissiveness of the Counterculture of the sixties and seventies that called into question/ challenged traditional American valves, especially marriage and the nuclear family. Cultural Conservatives understand better than Progressives that monogamous family life is the foundation of modern society--if you put out this lynchpin, then the whole system will eventually fall—and that is why experimenting with alternatives to it cuts sorely into the conservative core of most Americans (on the Right and Left). We need to question and challenge, again, the sexually conservative core of the American psyche because it is preventing progressive politics from taking hold and growing.

The fragmentation of the tribe into isolated nuclear units, which predates the body-hating, guilt-ridden morality of Christianity, was a huge blow to the communitarian nature and sexual freedom of human beings, making it the deepest layer in the geology of exterminism. We must face and embrace our tribal essence in order to heal the wounds we have inflected on ourselves and the planet. I am not suggesting starting communes in America because, for one thing, this path is not economically feasible for most of us, and, for another reason, we are not ready, inwardly, for such “high” living, even if some of us would verbally agree to it. However, Refusing Monogamy is within our reach, wounded and fearful as we are, and this simple decision is an important beginning that would shake the foundation of our entire lifestyle (which is based on the single-family household), and prepare the ground for a new way of life, a new/old tribalism, but if and only if it is combined with progressive political awareness and action.

I propose that politically aware individuals (those who know that Global Capitalism is causing world-destruction) form free associations that renounce monogamy in principle, in favor of the principle that it is possible and desirable to sexually love more than one person of the opposite sex at the same time. I say, “in principle” because there can be nothing obligatory about sexual love except the willingness, courage, and intelligence not to limit it. It is perfectly acceptable, according to my strategy for social change, for a politically awake person not to find sexual love with anyone, or perhaps only with one person, so long as s/he remains genuinely open to the ideal of unlimited sexual love, and does not give up on this ideal. What would this accomplish?

This strategy would form a political community that is united not only by ideas and values, but also by emotions and desires. This is the key to successful political organization and mobilization because ideas and ideals, no matter how big and important, are not strong enough, by themselves, to hold people together over the long run witness the rise and fall of numerous progressive movements throughout American history and during recent decades. The failed historical pattern is that caring individuals gather and organize for the best political reasons, but over time the group declines from within due to jealousy, competition, or personality conflicts of one kind or another. Only a holistic or integral community that engages the whole human being—mind, heart, and desire (knowledge, compassion, and sex), can achieve the cohesion, solidarity, creativity, and intelligence that are required for the long and difficult task of total social transformation.

Once sexual love is put in a monogamous box, then the couple becomes a community within a community, which is to say, it fragments the larger community, prevents it from reaching higher levels of complexity, integration and oneness, stops the free flow of sexual energy which is the only force in the universe, beyond friendship and intellectual bonding, strong enough to overcome the artificial boundaries that separate, isolate, and imprison us. If we let sex out of the box, among the politically awake, at least in theory or principle, then We could initiate a new paradigm of togetherness, devotion, love and oneness. Given the selfishness that presently prevails in the dominate culture, I am not proposing that free love outside of a safe progressive political context is the best strategy for social change (although it remains an individual and universal ideal), but if it is part of a progressive political community effort, then non-exclusive or non-monogamous sexual love could become the vehicle for deep social change, the groundswell for a new politics of vitality, adventure, and joy.

There is nothing young adults care about more than sexual love. Giving our politics a sexual basis that deepens and expands the meaning and function of love would draw them into a Movement (waiting to happen) far more powerfully than anything else, including (sad to say) ideas and ideals for ending world poverty, disease, genocide and ecocide. Sexual energy is the lifeblood of any social and political gathering or community, and if it is overly restrained and weakened by unnecessary and unquestioned customs and conventions, then frustration and boredom result, leaving only duty-bound morality to motivate people beyond ego and little family concerns, which has never been enough, and never will be enough, to avoid world disaster. In contrast, the battle cry, “refuse monogamy in favor of sexual-love-politics for world transformation” would certainly get and hold their attention, not to mention the attention of the media, and it could lead to a global youth revolution that finally rejects the false masters whose only joy is suffering until death for everyone.

Not just the young, but all adults have an inalienable right to a rich and diverse erotic life, but it is not to be found in this ascetic culture, not in our mental-politics, and not in our false (desexualized) spirituality that believes that Enlightenment comes from leaving behind the physical (the human body and the larger body of earth). The sad truth is that Americans cannot handle or embrace sex, not in our politics and not in our spirituality because we are infected with the “idea” of it as something dirty, shameful, or violent, i.e. infected with an anti-sexual morality/religion. Even the integration of politics and spirituality, if it leaves out sexual liberation, will not save us. The word “spirit” stands for the integration and evolution of the total human being, which means that the 3 dimensions of human existence (sexuality, love, and knowledge) comprise a balanced whole in which each part is playing its proper role and getting its own just dessert. Small circles of individuals who practice an integral politics that refuses to disregard or minimize any vital aspect of the human animal could found a new social order that everyone (sane) will eventually join.

Conclusion

The etiology of mental illness is usually sexual injury, and overwhelmingly so in American society in which many people can no longer think rationally as a result. Rational political discourse and action—voting, for example--presupposes freedom from sexual avoidance, over-restriction, and repression. Real Democracy in America must include an expansion of sexual freedom that opens the heart and the mind. It is this suppression of the Spirit as whole (reproducing itself throughout the Culture) that We must liberate.