Over a year ago, in the midst of great personal turmoil, I vowed to abandon any and all allegiance to and concern for faction and ideology. That is a vow I have, on the whole, managed to uphold in a fairly non-doctrinaire way, preferring the live-and-let-live stance — as opposed to ideology — of desiring the non-interference of the polis in my life and the taking of steps to minimize said interference without attempting to change political policy, as political activists do.
This approach places one in a position of what the Stoics called apoliteia (απολιτεια), the active and conscious avoidance of ties to faction and ideology and refusal of allegiance to political systems. Apoliteia may be interpreted to constitute one aspect of last phrase of the celebrated counter-cultural prescription given to Timothy Leary by Marshall McLuhan: Turn on, tune in, drop out. Leary himself said the following about the term “drop out”:
“‘Drop out’ suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. ‘Drop Out’ meant self-reliance, a discovery of one’s singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change.”
It is important to note that the apoliteic stance is not synonymous with mere apoliticism, the apathetic non-involvement in the life of the polis, nor is it identical with anarchism, the ideological rejection of the legitimacy of the State. To be sure, apoliteia entails the avoidance of political commitments at a deep level, but may be expressed better in what may be termed inner detachment toward the world of politics. Participation in politics need not be excluded if it is to the benefit of the participant; an important distinction to be drawn is that between viewing the State normatively, as an agent good or evil, either inherently or accidentally — the fascist and the progressive see the State as inherently good, for example, while the anarchist sees the State as inherently evil, conservatives and Marxists (both varieties of historicist) and liberals viewing it as good or evil accidentally, good at some times and evil at others — and viewing it descriptively, as a feature of the landscape like a canyon, mountain, hurricane, et cetera.
A traveler in the world does not “owe allegiance” to a cave, nor does he feel any normative commitment to a hilltop. These physical features may present either an advantage or an obstacle to him at different times, but his loyalty is never to them or to whatever principles they may be opposed to — to push the analogy, it matters little to him whether the cave is filled with sand or the hilltop eroded by water, except inasmuch as he prefers one aesthetic vision to another or is advantaged or disadvantaged by one arrangement or another; there remains no normative content to his assessment.
It is in this sense that the stance of apoliteia is related to the novelist Ernst Jünger’s concept of the Anarch, the man who is free in an interior sense, who has “dropped out” of “involuntary or unconscious commitments”, to use Leary’s terminology, and for whom neither the State nor the opposition thereto has any claim on his moral or psychical life. Jünger addresses this concept, one which undoubtedly informed his own life and worship of freedom within, in many of his novels, for example in Aladdin’s Problem wherein his main character, Friedrich Baroh, proclaims the following:
“I won’t go along with phrases like ‘more freedom.’ I am no liberal — at least not in the sense that people have to get together and vote on the matter. One carries freedom inside oneself; a man with a good mind will realize his potential in any regime. Once his good mind is recognized, he will advance anywhere, cross any line. He does not pass through the regimes, they pass through him, barely leaving a trace. He can do without them, but they cannot do without him. If they are strict, it hones his intelligence.”
Elsewhere he writes, “The Anarch is to the anarchist what the monarch is to the monarchist.” Whereas, the anarchist desires freedom, the Anarch simply is free. The Anarch maintains his freedom in spite of, rather than because of, whatever political regime or reign of values may be established at any time. Philosophically, we may be able to do less if we are lost in a canyon than if we are at home in the city, but were are no less free thereby. And so if we interpret the political landscape, which conditions the possibilities of our actions as surely as does the physical-geological landscape, as analogous to the physical-geological landscape, we may maintain the sense of inner detachment that leaves room for us to approach the world on our terms, a formula of freedom if not the formula therefor.
This sense of inner detachment toward the political is the same as that prescribed by Kṛṣṇa to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gītā (भगवद्गीता, Song of God). As an outline of the warrior ethic proper to the Kṣatriya caste as defined by the Manusmṛti (मनुस्मृति, Laws of Manu), the Gītā describes the non-identification by the subject with any material or temporal thing and the dedication of all action to Bráhman-Ātman (ब्रह्मन्आत्मन्) — the supreme universal Godhead, which is to say the supreme universal Self — as the path to Mokṣa (मोक्ष, Liberation). This profound inner detachment allows for the fulfillment of one’s dhárma, the duties and obligations, or, most accurately, roles, associated with one’s person — the Latin persona means the masque worn by actors in Græco-Roman drama, each masque literally being the role the actor behind it plays — without being psychically enslaved by that dhárma. Consciousness of one’s roles qua roles is key here, for it is well said that knowledge is power, and one is freed by the defetishization of those things that were previously mysterious. This is a meaning of initiation into esoteric mysteries, and I believe this method is, in essence, identical with that of the Stoic-Jüngerian apoliteic Anarch.
Central to the apoliteic stance is a thoroughgoing pragmatism wedded to a profound spiritual sense. Were there a political arrangement or ideology that could solve the “political problem” in this age, it would already obtain and be successful, for such an ideology would be understandable and agreeable to all while being practically efficacious in satisfying our demands for the fulfillment of our values. The evidence that no such political system exists is the very fact that it does not obtain; either our agreeable and therefore implementable ideologies are ineffective at solving the problems they are intended to address, or those ideological systems that would be effective at solving our problems are so disagreeable to so many that their implementation is impossible. We have, therefore, little evidence of even the existence of a political approach worth devoting our vital energies and time to; and even if such a system existed, it would not be necessary to strive for, since it would combine possibility (the acceptance of those for whom it is intended) with practicality (the effective solution of the political problem).
Recognizing that no political solution exists, the apoliteic Anarch, invariably a free-thinker, attempts to more clearly discern the true scale of power in the world, seeing that any analysis thereof cannot be constricted to the homosphere, the domain of man. All our ideologies — whether monarchical, aristocratic, or democratic; capitalist, communist, fascist, liberal, or socialist — are homocratic in essence, assuming the primary or even sole power of man and therefore assuming the political project to be the proper determination of the distribution and role of the human powers of governance. Recognizing that human power is but an aspect of what determines and conditions human destiny, the Anarch requires a further explication of what variety of governance actually obtains in the world, and will base his approach to life on such a deepened and widened view, contra the ideologies and political descriptions. Such a view is to be discussed in Pt II: Biocracy.
Ouroboric Philosophy 