One of my favorite cranky sages in the blogosphere is Eleutheros, found over at How Many Miles from Babylon, who explains quite poetically the benefits of leaving Babylon, or the System under which we mostly all toil.
His latest entry is a must-read. I'll excerpt it here, but you should check out the whole thing. He is writing in response to someone who asked him, "How does one go about 'leaving Babylon?' Good stuff.
To walk away from Babylon, you must have choices. Alas, it is likely you don't even if you most certainly think you do. Babylon, as with any exploitative and controlling system, can only exist by limiting and eliminating your choices. After all, if you actually have choices, you may in fact choose the things that benefit and enhance you and your family rather than things that benefit Babylon.
Babylon must eliminate your ability to choose. It does so with the help of two effective ploys. First, it will offer you false choices in order to distract you from the fact that you have no real choices at all.
A desperate maneuver of failed parenting is when a child is adamant that he does not want to go somewhere, you say, "We need to get ready to go now, do you want to wear the blue shirt or the red one?" The hope being that the child will become absorbed in choosing which color shirt to choose and forget for the moment all his objections about going in the first place...
For example, people are always asking us what sort of alternate electrical energy we are using, because, after all, if you are going to escape from Babylon, you surely don't want to be connected to the grid! It's a false choice to choose, say, solar electric or grid electric. If you "escape" being tied down to a monthly electric bill, you are saddled with the expense of a depreciating and deteriorating electric system you own...
The second way in which Babylon enforces its no-choice policy is when there really is a choice you might make, Babylon convinces you that you really don't have that choice at all. To be able to raise any of our own food we have to borrow money for land, right! You have to go to college, right? Gotta have wheels, gotta have a credit card, right?
Wrong. Those, and many more, are all things Babylon chants over and over until the idea that you could do without them entirely is just beyond belief...
...Your escape from Babylon begins when you can say, "No, I have a choice. Oh, I can dine around Babylon's table if I choose, but if the Babyonian terms and conditions are odious, then I don't have to."
2 comments:
That's good stuff, indeed. Facing the reality that we do not, in fact, have to buy in to the false "choices" presented to us, and can do and be whatever we wish has always been a guiding principle of my life. While my wife and I live a pretty "normal", middle-class, suburban existence, we also recognize its artificiality. I, for one, would be just as happy living in a loft in some bohemian neighborhood, and I think Lisa feels the same.
Part of seeing through the multiple lies which straight-jacket our lives, I think, is being a Christian. For me, that's true, at least. All we need to do is love God and lover our neighbors; everything else is negotiable, in my book.
Even more terrifically difficult, though, is facing the interior Babylon. Heroes help us see choice, but have little influence over that inner voice.
I do not intend to support a notion of depravity so much as a more psychological notion of self and its unconscious, inchoate but tenacious defense.
To know this dark side of self is a constant process and vigil, undying whatever choices I make in world. There are guides, but none that live with me as a part of me.
I have never found being a Christian helps me. The body of identification that comes with such a being has resources but, in the end, pages and people are outside oneself. The disciplinary practice of Christian devotion, however, gets much closer to the marrow. As do other practices of prayer and meditation, self awareness, breath awareness.
Still, there is a silence beyond from where the radio waves of Babylon are still broadcast.
No Christian faith of mine at any rate throws back the waves of despair I have for the lack of moral compassion in much of my countryman. This election cycle has cost me sleep and filled reservoirs of anger that empty only partially.
No Buddhist "just sitting" clears the false choices I make as an American male of my time and prepares a way for Edenic living. Certainly not in Brooklyn.
Babylon is part of me I guess Jungians would say and part of my world I should accept it for the temporal mark of my being that it is. Try as I might, I'm going to have to give up voting it out. Obama will not deliver on such a Messianic hope. Who can. But I'll never give up the hope. How can I? I am an American, after all, paradise can happen here, it's just a matter of time and getting that light on the hill just so.
But Christian devotion seems to tamper with my messianic expectations. (That Buddhist meditation does, too, is an obvious outcome I still resent despite how hard I try to empty my mind and attend to the Babylonian noise). When did the two team up like this and who let it happen? And so much of contemporary meditation and respectable mysticism spring the same peaceable lessons on me like a toothless lion.
When did prayer become so avuncular, killing prophecy with equanimity?
Maybe when the fight against the inner Babylon became a task of purifying myself with classically protestant rigor, Babylon slipped a subliminally victorious message in my morning devotion.
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