SLAVE OR FREE?

A long time ago, I slaved in a machine shop in southern Ohio, owned by a cagey but illiterate graduate of a small southern Indiana mechanical engineering college. Jack, I’ll call him, paid poorly, offered no health insurance and was a conservative Republican, but he was a brilliant inventor and rough as a dried cob. To look at something Jack wrote, full of misspelling and poor grammar, you’d imagine he was dumber than a door knob, but he wasn’t. He’d just been raised roughly beside a railroad track without a mother and by a father who was often gone in the Missouri woods, evaluating timber for saw mills. Jack said he’d been raised by poor black women and their families who took pity on him while his Dad was gone in the woods for long periods of time.

One day in the late Sixties or early Seventies, I was bitching and moaning to Jack about how everybody in America seemed willing to be a slave to Nixon. Jack snorted and brilliantly drawled in his Missouri accent. “Why, George, everyone’s a slave to their stomach.” I’ve never been able to shake Jack’s truism, but lately, watching Bush’s religious “goings on”, I’ve been adding twists and turns to it.

Okay—yes, we are slaves to our stomachs. We humans have got to eat, and we’ve got to make ends meet and that involves us in the economy and in the world. Somehow, by self-employment, laboring or managing, we gotta get food for our stomachs and clothes for our backs and pay rents or mortgages, etcetera. No way around it. We’re obligated to the dollar. So in laboring, we become slaves to financial institutions, to capital, and we become slaves to management or the market or consumer vagaries or to various other tyrannical supervisors.

Now, of course, we can always quit and find another way to get the filthy lucre we need—at least, most of the time. Sometimes that’s not so easy. Financial freedom isn’t always easy to achieve even in a free country. Depending upon unemployment figures and the economy, we are more or less free to change jobs. So, to call us slaves when it comes to the dollar is using the term loosely but semi-accurately.

But, above all this monetary hierarchy, there’s another kind of freedom which has nothing to do with money and that’s freedom of thought and belief, and I’m ever amazed how many people are willing to give up their freedom of mind in order to feel psychologically secure. I’m talking true believers here. I’m speaking of those who surrender their mental life for a belief in one of the old god/kings who began their mental rule in the psychological world of the ancients.

Further, I think it’s no accident that fundamentalists who worship this ancient hypothetical god/king are the easiest for an authoritarian like Bush to lead around by the nose. Believers are prepped to support hierarchies of power and authoritarian dictators. They’re ripe for the picking.

That’s why it’s time for modern peoples of the 21st Century to make the final move against these ancient god/kings of the mind which enslave us and set us up to be led by unworthy world leaders. Let’s just take Christianity, for example.

Currently we’ve got a pile of fundamentalist Americans who worship an ancient god/king who, according to their inventive, psychological story, has killed their father Adam in a fit of pique because Adam disobeyed an order because he didn’t know that to disobey an order was wrong because Adam couldn’t know right from wrong until after he’d eaten of the apple. A real Catch 22 there, eh? Still, this unfair and unjust god/king gets out of the trap of injustice by supposedly sending his son to die in Adam’s place so that Adam can have eternal life in another place far from Earth. Where’s Child Protective Services when some poor Jesus guy needs it?

Still Adam’s got to die, mind you, but he’s been redeemed and has a chance at eternal life. So do we all, according to the king’s tale. All poor Adam’s sons (all of us) have to do to be redeemed is betray our father Adam and all his progeny and acknowledge the unjust authority of the god/king over us. We must accept the second hand tale which is given us at face value. We must become a coconspirator with this god/king against our forebears, and we must believe this god/king’s tale of eternal life who has already proven himself unworthy and untrustworthy by the way he treated poor Adam and his own son. Further, this god/king has the power of life and death over us, according to his legend. If we believe him, we get eternal life. If we doubt him, we get eternal suffering.

And right there, at life and death, is where Christian myth and human reality combine in a very powerful coercion. For, to avenge the mythical father, Adam (the evolutionary father) and to disbelieve the Bible story, we modern humans must, literally, accept our fate to be eternally dead. Now, who among us, has that courage—to lay our lives down in the cause of human freedom? In other words, to oppose the Christian myth of the god/king, we must accept our own mortality. Who among us loves his human freedom enough to die for it, to lay down his life for it?
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"It is impossible to experience one's death objectively and still carry a tune." —Woody Allen