(Title stolen from, and yet unrelated to, the Mountain Goats)
Now that I am middle aged – the summer of life, I like to think – I have finally figured out what I want to be when I grow… Upper. I wanna be a heretic. I am not saying this to sound cool or shocking. I assure you, it’s the only thing that makes sense.
Like a lot of our ideas we stole the word heresy from Ancient Greece. It originally meant something like to “choose for oneself” or “go one’s own way.” It spoke of the time in a young life when a person is still sampling all the different flavors of philosophy the world has to offer, and finding which tastes best to you. Or better yet, creating a new recipe all your own.
William Blake was pure heretic when he said it plain and desperate, “I must invent my own systems or else be enslaved by other men’s.” And according to my computer’s dictionary, “His poems mark the beginning of romanticism and a rejection of the Age of Enlightenment.” So I guess he wasn’t just talking shit. But this raises the question, why would we choose to be “slaves” rather than heretics?
The Asch Conformity Experiments were a collection of tests so easy that when taken, people gave wrong answers less than 1% of the time… until they took them in a room with a handful of others.
Lets pretend that you’re the subject. You’re sitting in a room with a bunch of other volunteers and the experimenter shows you all a card with some lines on it, all you have to do is say which line on one card matches the line on another card. No problem, you’ve had this kinda shit down since kindergarten. The only thing is, all 7 of the people who went ahead of you just gave the same, obviously wrong, answer. They all seem sure and no one was even snickering about it. Now it’s your turn. What do you do?
Of course the right answer is, ‘stick with your gut,’ or ‘be true to yourself’ or some other such platitude, and naturally that’s what you or I would do. But because they doubted themselves, or felt the need to fit in, 75% of the test subjects gave in to the herd-and went along with the rest of the group. Obviously all who went first were really just actors and in on the joke. Yup, only 25% chose for themselves and went their own way every time. I like to think that I would’ve been one of those heretics, but I try to be more honest with myself, so I’ll just say… ‘Who knows?’
Admit it or not, we’re still damned dirty apes. It’s part of who we are. Semen-flinging, shit-kicking chimpanzees, and mother-fucking, slack-loving bonobos. By our very nature we are tribe animals. You can’t spend ten minutes out in the world without seeing it. The us-against-them, in-group/out-group dichotomy. We’re hooked on it. Are you a Yankees or a Red Socks fan? You a Mac or a P.C. user? Gay or straight? Jeep or motorcycle? Christian or Muslim? Freak or normal? Democrat or Republican? American or foreigner? A woman or man? Hipster or something with a soul? So many silly divisions that all basically boil down to, are you one of ‘my people’ or one of ‘them?’
Albert Einstein called nationalism “an infantile disease,” but he could’ve just as easily been talking about any of the other lines we so love to draw between ourselves. But wasn’t Big Al one of God’s Chosen People? Surely he wasn’t talking about religion. He’d never burn his membership card to such an exclusive club, right?
“For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong… have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power.” ~ A.E.
The cancers he was speaking of are the dark-side of our nature, the megalomania and abuses of power that we don’t like to admit still live deep within our monkey brain-meats. We don’t like to think of those things as our problems. We aren’t the bad guys, ‘they’ are. Einstein wouldn’t have been surprised at all if he’d lived long enough to hear science tell us that regardless of race or social background 1% of all the people in the world are sociopaths. Statistically speaking, if your ‘tribe’ has 100 people in it, it’ll have at least 1 potential monster. And how about the wife-beaters, child-molesters, and sickos so fuct we don’t even have names for them? If your group is big enough, you’ve got some of those too. Are you really so much more like those ‘your people’ than you are with someone from across the isle?
Tribes may have stood for something back when we lived in small communities of families where everyone took care of, and regulated, their own. Now we live in a world nearing 10 billion people and divide ourselves up into concept-groups with thousands or millions. Saying all my people are good isn’t far off from saying all those people are bad. Both rob the world of it’s beautiful complexities and the intricacies of the human-animal.
We’re all self-fulfilling prophets and whether we like to admit it or not, we mold ourselves to fit our definition of ourselves. The more we think of ourselves as existing within these meaningless titles, these boundaries, created before we were even born, the more we subjugate ourselves and choose to limit our potential. To de-fine means to make finite.
Do you ever have questions that spin around in your head so fast you can almost hear them boring their way out of your skull? Me neither. But if I did they’d keep me awake asking, “How much of me is me? How much am I just my conditioning?”
“Are we all the same? If you and I switched places and I’d lived your life, would I be exactly like you are now? Would you be me? What about all those ‘thems’ and ‘monsters’ out there? If I had their pasts would I be that today?”
I like to think not. But I’ve no evidence of this so I’m not sure if that makes me an optimist or just naive. “Can we strip away what our culture has built on top and get down to our very cores? Would we find who we truly are? And if so how?”
Now that I list them out I wonder if it’s just the psychedelics keeping me awake and taking the questions along for the ride…
You see that?! I made thinking these ‘strange’ questions into a joke. Why? Because when you bring this sort of things up people start to look at you weird. Why? Because our culture tells us they’re a waste of time. These aren’t the type of conversations we value. “Now get back to work or go watch TV or something!”
(Another fun little psychological experiment I wrote up but just made this post too long)
Social Conditioning is so ubiquitous it’s invisible. It forms our notions of good and bad, beautiful and ugly, wealth and poverty. It’s how we decide the things we need, be it religion, education, health, money, family, art, or porn. Doesn’t that seem awfully limiting? There’s a whole world out there, filled with countless forms of foods and drugs, passions and persuasions, adventures and experiments that you would’ve loved had you grown up with them. And you’re missing out on them because you believe you’re not that type of person. But you could be. Life is short. Experience as much as you can before you wind up on your deathbed, realizing just how unfulfilled you’ve always been.
“Do not accept what you hear by report, do not accept tradition, do not accept a statement because it is found in our books, not because it is in accord with your belief, nor because it is the saying of your teacher… Be lamps onto yourselves.” ~ Buddha’s final words.
