What are the people of Germany doing? Sleeping. Their sleep is filled with nightmares and anxiety, but they are sleeping. We have awaited their awakening for so long, yet they continue to remain stolid, stubborn, and silent as to the crimes committed in their names, as if the entire world and its own destiny had become alien to them. All agree: the German people slumber on amid the twilight of their gods. They do not love liberty, because they hate criticism. That is why they are sleeping today.

Albert Camus
September 17, 1944

Albert Camus’s insightful description of life in Nazi Germany, which appeared in the clandestine Resistance newspaper Combat a few weeks after the Liberation of Paris, could just as well have been written about life in the United States today. Not unlike the people of Nazi Germany, the American people are also asleep.

We have slept through the annihilation of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine, a war with Islam, the rendition of terrorist suspects, prisoner abuse and torture, the suppression of civil liberties, citizen surveillance, corporate greed, pandering to the rich and powerful, global warming, full spectrum dominance, imperial overstretch, and a culture of deceit. Massive military spending, multi-trillion dollar deficits and Wall Street bailouts, mounting trade deficits, and a precipitous decline in the value of the dollar have gone virtually unnoticed.

During our long period of slumber the United States government has lost its moral authority. It is owned, operated, and controlled by Wall Street and Corporate America. The United States has become ungovernable, unfixable, and, therefore, unsustainable economically, politically, militarily, and environmentally. It has evolved into the wealthiest, most powerful, most materialistic, most racist, most militaristic, most violent empire of all times.

While claiming to be individualists, we behave as world-class conformists. We think the same, share many of the same religious beliefs, vote the same, watch the same TV programs, visit the same websites, and buy the same low-priced Chinese plastic yuck from Wal-Mart. “All the women are strong, the men are all good looking, and all the children are above average,” just as they are in Garrison Keillor’s mythical Lake Wobegon. And we all pretend to be happy. But is it really true?

Even though we spend $8 trillion annually on consumer goods and services, $2 trillion of which is for health care, and billions more on spiritual gurus and religious shaman, are we as happy as we pretend to be? I think not, because what we are up against is the human condition, God’s gift to us in the Garden of Eden from which there is no escape – separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and death. Not a pretty sight. Our feel-good religious leaders to whom we turn for spiritual solace try unsuccessfully to sugarcoat it. French existentialist Albert Camus called it absurd.

Unfortunately, the American Empire itself is a metaphor for the human condition. Tens of millions are drawn to the Empire in search of a refuge from the human condition only to discover that the Empire is an integral part of the problem, not the solution.

What are our options in terms of possible responses to the existential angst produced by the human condition? Escape, denial, engagement, and confrontation.

First, we may escape the human condition altogether through suicide. We may choose death and nothingness now over the pain and suffering associated with separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and fear of eventual death.

Second, we may deny the human condition through a life based on having—owning, possessing, manipulating, and controlling people, power, money, machines, and material wealth. Through having we try to find security and certainty in an otherwise uncertain world. Our compulsive desire to have leads to affluenza, technomania, e-mania, megalomania, robotism, globalization, and imperialism. Some call it technofascism. It often leads us to the arms of the Empire in search of a safe haven which turns out to be illusory.

Third, we may choose to engage the human condition through being—by our creations, our personal relationships, our spirituality, our sense of community, and our stand towards pain, suffering and death. So-called simple living is a popular form of being. But if the world is going to hell in a handbasket, for how long can a life based only on being allay our angst?

Fourth, we may confront the human condition and peacefully rebél against the money, power, speed, greed, and size of the icons of the Empire—the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon, Wall Street, the Internet, Fox News, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, as well as the churches, schools, and universities which suck up to them.

Rebél is a philosophy of rebellion. It provides us with the faith to claw meaning out of meaninglessness, the energy to connect with those from whom we are separate, the power to surmount powerlessness, and the strength to face death rather than deny it. Since the word rebel has more than one meaning, we use Rebél to connote resistance to authority and control.

Two rebels are our role models—Jesus Christ and Albert Camus. One was thought to have been the son of God, the Messiah, the other a French agnostic. One offered a message of hope, the other admonished us to “live only with what we know.” Both had an uncanny grasp of the human condition and an unwavering predisposition towards nonviolent rebellion against it. Somewhat surprisingly, the Holy Bible turns out to be one of the best handbooks a rebel can read whether one be an atheist, an agnostic, or a believer.

If life is absurd, is there any reason to believe that tomorrow or the day after will be any different from yesterday or the day before, as in the movie Ground Hog Day starring Bill Murray? Even though no cosmic source of meaning has been revealed to us, we find ourselves drawn to Camus’s idea that the purpose of life is to die happy and that the path to a happy death leads straight to rebellion.

Therefore, rebél against the human condition and the Empire, live life to the fullest, and try to die happy by mindfully defining your personal legacy, which some call your soul.

But Rebél is not for everyone, particularly not the faint of heart, for it offers no spiritual elixir or magic potion to relieve our existential pain. It is neither a fire insurance policy against hell, nor a ticket to heaven. It is not a touchy-feely, self-help, feel-good, be-happy philosophy promising pie-in-the-sky to its adherents. Religious fundamentalists, pacifists, and those in search of a spiritual nirvana are not likely to be drawn to Rebél. Although it may not be what we learned in Sunday School, it surely beats nothingness.

Rebél is about the peaceful denunciation, demystification, and defince of the tyranny of ciphers, which psychiatrist M. Scott Peck called people of the lie. Its radical imperative involves disengagement, decryption, decentralization, downsizing, and dissolution.

In the meantime,

Rebél
Thomas H. Naylor
November 1, 2009

1. The Empire. Void of moral authority, unsustainable, ungovernable, and unfixable.

2. Political Independence. Downsize, decentralize, demilitarize, democratize, and dissolve.

3. Human Scale. Small is beautiful. Human scale trumps the politics of money, power, size, speed, greed, and fear of terrorism.

4. Sustainability. Simplify. Make molehills out of mountains. Enough is enough. Repair, reuse, recycle.

5. Solidarity. Think, act, and buy locally.

6. Power Sharing. Devolve. Share power. One person, one vote.

7. Equal Opportunity. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

8. Tension Reduction. Might doesn’t make right. Reduce tension; don’t escalate conflict.

9. Village Green. Small, rural, radical, clean, green, democratic, nonviolent, and communitarian.

Rebél
Thomas H. Naylor
October 20, 2009

According to a 2008 Zogby Poll 73 percent of Americans do not believe a state has the right to secede from the Union. A 2009 Rasmussen Poll found that 31 percent of Texans believe Texas does have such a right. Although eighteen percent of Texans actually favor secession, only 11.5 percent of Vermonters do. What causes a person to commit to secession? What pushes one over the brink?

Secession is a radical act of rebellion grounded in anger and fear but tempered by a positive image of the future. Although anger and fear may be necessary conditions for a decision to secede, they are by no means sufficient conditions. For example, in 2008 millions of Americans truly hated George W. Bush, but interest in secession did not increase significantly. Instead, disgruntled Americans voted for Barack Obama. The economic meltdown of 2008 generated real fear among many Americans, but rather than fleeing from the American Empire which was the cause of many of their problems, they took refuge in the arms of the Empire. They bought U.S. dollars and Treasury bonds, applied for bailouts and government stimulus funds, and seemed unconcerned about multitrillion-dollar budget deficits and the fact that the Fed was printing money like it was going out of style. Secession was not even on the national radar screen.

Letting go of one’s images of America as “the home of the free and the land of the brave” and “the greatest nation in the world” is a gut-wrenching, emotional decision which can only be sustained by outrage – outrage at a government which has truly lost its moral authority. What are the trigger mechanisms which will induce a person to cut his or her emotional ties to the Union and decathect psychologically from the Empire? That turns out to be a very tough question to answer. Is there something about the character of a state which influences the willingness of its citizens to secede?

Some say it depends on a careful assessment of the economic costs and benefits of secession for the individual or family. Others say it’s more dependent on a well defined vision of what a future independent state might look like economically, politically, socially, etc. Still others maintain self-sufficiency is necessary before seriously entertaining the possibility of secession. All of this seems to imply that a decision to secede is a carefully calculated decision at the margin, which I believe is pure bunk. Secession is more of a decision from the heart and the soul rather than the intellect.

Some claim that a person will not run for the legislature as a secessionist unless a secessionist political platform is available spelling out the future of the independent republic. This too is nonsense. The decision to run for political office as an open secessionist is an act of political will. The candidate will choose his or her own platform not one prepared by some political organization.

There is little evidence to suggest that a person can be persuaded to secede. However, one can be made aware of the differences in the consequences associated with secession versus remaining in the Empire.

Unlike by-the-book electoral politics in the United States, secession does not lend itself to coalition politics. The reason is that secession is too provocative, too politically incorrect. For example, one might assemble a group of localvore, simple living, organic farming, peak oil, conservation advocates who are not perceived to be hostile towards secession. However, given a chance they will always promote their own respective agendas and simply ignore secession because secession is too hot to handle. The coalition becomes virtually meaningless.

Just as the politics of Eastern Europe in the 1980s was single-issue politics, bringing down the communist regimes, so too is secession politics. Secession politics is necessarily single-issue, single-objective, single-strategy politics. The issue is the corruption of the American Empire. The objective is political independence and peaceable dissolution of the Empire. The strategy involves confronting the loss of moral authority of the U.S. Government and all of its collaborators.

In the final analysis the decision to secede is based on the conclusion that “enough is enough.” I cannot and will not tolerate any longer the corruption and loss of moral authority of my government. Such a decision is a very personal and very painful decision. It is not risk free, but neither is staying in the Empire.

Rebél
Thomas H. Naylor
October 1, 2009