If we are true to our vision of absolute ungovernability, the rest will follow. There is no need to “do” politics. The community is everything. And the everything of which the community is comprised is this: a group of gentle, flexible, nearly unbreakable individuals, slow to anger, swift in defense of the community and of the land, ungovernable in all things.
Leaderville has managed to convince people that an ungovernable person is a danger to her fellows. The truth is precisely the opposite. The person who agrees to be governed has written a blank check to the most violent in our midst. Standing armies, sitting parliaments, and lying councilors?of such is the apparatus of prostration comprised. What have these rogues and their states to do with our communities and our humanity?
In violent but useless reaction to these terrible manifestations (standing, sitting, lying), history floats “bills of rights” upon the froth of its own depredations as false solace. Such documents are drafted by rich white slave owners, and non-rich, non-white, non-slave owners are expected to rejoice at the “protections” of the bills. A maggot could expect as much protection from the bill of an eagle.
A phrase like “slave owner” says as much as it needs to, and then some. Without its potent little pocket-phallus of a hyphen, it suggests that the owner is himself a slave. Slave, owner. Slave/owner. Men of this ilk are the founding fathers of all leadervilles.
In the midst of leaderville’s rush to judgment and government, the ungovernable woman is a tower of strength not only for herself but for those in her community. Unlike the mob rule of democracy, the power of ungovernability is such that even a committed minority working inside leaderville can effect great change for good.
Ungovernability is nurturing, self-present in its communities. Here is food, here the warmth of the sun, here a reality susceptible to fashioning by the hands of the curious.
In seewalk-the-ungoogleable, which can only be found in the heart or in the hard-thrust palm, we teach: there are only food, shelter, and curiosity. This is life and health. Politics, by contrast, is the call away from life to the antipodes. Both spiritually and spatially, politics is the siren of elsewhere, the hail from and to the other side of the globe, to an enlistment in governing and long-distance meddling.
Politics: the barren and lascivious Uncle Sam diddling the children of others because he has none of his own, or has killed those he had. He wants yours. He’s a leech and a lech who wants to fondle your body cavity to see if you’re a terran, a person of the earth. He’s pretty sure you’re going to let him do this. He believes in government of the peephole, by the peephole, and four-to-the-peephole. Plumbing filled with rats, vengeance for leaks. Leaks? Kill the messenger.
As if one level of government were not already too much, level is compounded upon level, leaders upon leaders, forcing the people at the bottom to pay tribute to subsidize the Dantean, grotesque?Dantesque?superstructure. The house of cads is propped up with the form of theft called tax, which is always, absolutely always, taken at gunpoint. Only a fool does not understand this. Only a fool would pay this tribute willingly. All taxation is a theft that comes directly from the vice of representation. It is one thing to have your wallet stolen, quite another to donate it to the thief without a murmur. Here, we murmur. People of the right tell themselves the corporations are a better steward of the people’s money than are the people themselves. People of the left tell themselves governments are a better steward of the people’s money. But to relinquish tribute so easily is a form of self-loathing, and it undermines communities.
Civilization is a cradle. Its teat is the propaganda of prostration. Voters suck. Voters suck because they have never asked themselves if they could leave childish things behind. When I ask people who have never done anything but prostrate themselves before the daddyleader what they need a leader for, they think I am talking nonsense. Pure Truth so clearly needs The Franchise and its prostrations?da da, ga ga?that only a madman would question The Franchise. Yet there are three billion of us who have no part in The Franchise, who have not signed on to the bloody deed. Mr. Brown was out of town. We left him there, till the progressives brought him back, fresh from killing Mr. Black.
Despite the daily attacks of leaderville in general and of democracy in particular, we can discover that our true life in community is not complex. Food, shelter, curiosity. If food is not right to hand, if the sun does not warm our days, we ask: what is the shortest distance to this goodness? Such is the path of the ungovernable man. Ungovernable is he who holds food in his hand and tenders this to his fellows. Ungovernable is she who finds the sunlight of a sheltered nook and shares it with her community.
You can in theory kill the ungovernable, but you cannot steal or redirect their life force. You’ll get nothing out of it, and even the killing is likely to be more costly than you had anticipated. There is little incentive to exploit them or enslave them?they will be an eternal headache, your machines will break near them, nothing will go right. Best to let them go. But do not follow them. Follow yourself, and the rest is beyond history.
DAVID Ker THOMSON has a PhD in early American literature and history from Princeton, and a half-dozen years on the street, for starters. He lives on the continent Peter Watts calls N’Am. He can be reached at: Dave.thomson@utoronto.ca