This is the third and final part of Glenn Parton's latest essay. Part one, Exterminism, is a broad criticism of Western culture. Part two, Free Love,
outlines a mystical approach in support of a polyamory lifestyle. In
this third part, The Great Refusal, he advocates a movement that
combines a rejection of monogamy with a progressive integral politics.The ideas in
the essay are Glenn's, not mine, and you can tell him what you think
through the comment facility below, or e-mail him
directly. Although I'll be writing about my reaction to Glenn's essay
in a future article, my general views on the subject were contained in this article.
The Great Refusal by Glenn Parton
The development of global financial markets and transnational
corporations is the Big Problem, but this does not mean that there is
no significant difference between the Republican and Democratic
Parties. The Republican Party is nothing but the political arm of
corporate globalization on U.S. terms, while the Democratic Party has
some wider human and ecological interests and concerns that will “slow
down” the process, and upon this “small” difference hangs the fate of
the earth and its inhabitants because we need “time” to evolve
fundamental lifestyle changes to American-led world capitalism. Only by
slowing down the Corporate-Republican agenda (which is speeding us
directly to hell), with the assistance of the Democratic Party, can we
secure the essential time to resolve the Deep Crisis.
Party-politics or electoral politics is the politics of emergency: it’s
about putting out fires, treating the symptoms, staying alive, while we
develop an Alternative to being burned and buried by a nuclear fireball
or Global Warming. It postpones disaster, but it will not save the
world unless we also begin, very soon, a deep, long-range eco-social
movement that transforms the established reality (in the available time
given to us by the politics of emergency). If we don’t root out the
original cause of U.S. global hegemony, then this social disease will
grow back even stronger until it kills all of Life on earth.
Resurrecting the Founding Fathers is not the remedy because Ben
Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, Alexander
Hamilton, wanted to pursue their own entrepreneurial endeavors with a
minimum of government interference, so they set up, under the influence
of Adam Smith, a free-market society in which the American political
system enables the unlimited accumulation of wealth in the private
sector by removing natural and man-made obstacles. To borrow a metaphor
form Calvin Coolidge, the country was to be carried comfortable down
the river by the current or flow of Capital, and the function of
government is merely to put out an oar where there is any danger of it
drifting into the bank. Unfortunately, the Founding Fathers saw
government as the major threat to (commercial) freedom, with no
understanding that the major threat to (human) freedom is the
concentration and centralization of wealth in private hands, and there
is nothing in the constitution, as they envisioned it, to correct this
fatal flaw of no positive role for government in the re-distribution of
wealth.
We need a completely new American Experiment that does not replace
British Empire with American Empire, but rather, restores the tribal
wisdom to see (immediately and intuitively) the atrocities of “free
enterprise” (or what Smith called “a New Order of the Ages” that is
inscribed on the back of each dollar bill). In the jungle towns of
Ecuador it is known that Global Empire destroys forests, pollutes
rivers, pushes indigenous cultures to the brink of extinction. The
neighboring people of Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil do not want to
be integrated into a worldwide system of commerce that privatizes key
sectors of the economy: energy, water, sanitation, transportation,
utilities, and communications, because they know that “liberating the
market, deregulation, trade liberalization” polarizes the world into
the super-rich and the global proletarian, i.e. into the masters of the
universe and those who suffer tighter and tighter austerity measures.
The whole system of world capitalism is so unnatural, so contrary to
human nature, that it is resisted by the overwhelming majority of
(sane) people around the world (including Iraqis, who oppose the
globalization and privatization of their state enterprises) but not in
America, where about one-half of the voting population supports it,
brags about it, fights for it, and goes to war for it, not out of
ignorance, for the facts and evidence of the Great American Beast are
everywhere, but due to psychological damage from the cumulative
over-restriction of sexual freedom, more than anything else, that
closes the heart and mind. Once the heart and mind are closed, due to
sexual wounding, then people stop learning from the consequences of
their actions and end up supporting, with a lot of hatred and
resentment, destructive ends. If we are to defeat the American rise and
supremacy of the psychologically damaged, which are using voting-power
to harm themselves and everyone in the world, then we need a new
American Political Experiment of Sexual Liberation (that ultimately
leads to the creation of a tribal constitution that exceeds the scope
of this essay).
The merger of the Religious Right and the Neocons is predicable because
they are both reactionary movements to the permissiveness of the
Counterculture of the sixties and seventies that called into question
and challenged traditional American values, especially marriage and the
nuclear family. Cultural Conservatives understand better than
Progressives that monogamous family life is the foundation of modern
society--if you put out this lynchpin, then the whole system will
eventually fall—and that is why experimenting with alternatives to it
cuts sorely into the conservative core of most Americans (on the Right
and Left). We need to question and challenge, again, the sexually
conservative core of the American psyche because it is preventing
progressive politics from taking hold and growing.
The fragmentation of the tribe into isolated nuclear units, which
predates the body-hating, guilt-ridden morality of Christianity, was a
huge blow to the communitarian nature and wider sexual freedom of human
beings, making it the deepest layer in the geology of exterminism, and
so we must face and embrace the sexual dimension of our being in order
to heal the wounds we have inflected on ourselves and the planet. I am
not suggesting starting communes in America because, for one thing,
this path is not economically feasible for most of us, and, for another
reason, we are not ready, inwardly, for such “high” living, even if
some of us could verbally agree that this is the best way to live.
However, Refusing Monogamy is within our reach, wounded and fearful as
we are, and this simple decision would shake and eventually crumble the
foundation of our entire way of life (which is based on the
single-family household), and prepare the ground for a new lifestyle,
but if and only if it is combined with political activism.
I propose that politically aware individuals (those who know that
Global Empire is causing world-destruction) form free associations of
individuals who renounce monogamy in principle, in favor of the
principle that it is possible and desirable to sexually love more than
one person of the opposite sex at the same time. I say, “in principle,”
because there can be nothing obligatory about sexual love except the
willingness, courage, and intelligence not to limit it. It is perfectly
acceptable, according to my strategy for social change, for a
politically awake person not to find sexual love with anyone, or
perhaps only with one person, so long as s/he remains genuinely open to
the ideal of unlimited sexual love, and does not give up on this
endeavor. What would this accomplish?
This strategy would form a political community that is united not only
by ideas and values, but also by emotions and desires. This is the key
to successful political organization because ideas and ideals, no
matter how important, are not strong enough, by themselves, to hold
people together over the long run—witness the rise and fall of numerous
progressive movements over the last half-century. The pattern is that
caring individuals gather and organize for the best political reasons,
but over time the group declines from within due to jealousy,
competition, or personality conflicts of one kind or another. Only a
holistic or integral community that engages the whole human being—mind,
heart, and desire (knowledge, compassion, and sex), can achieve the
cohesion, solidarity, creativity, and intelligence that are required
for the long and difficult task of total social transformation.
Once sexual love is put in a monogamous box, then the couple becomes a
community within a community, which is to say, it fragments the larger
community, prevents it from reaching higher levels of complexity,
integration and oneness, stops the free flow of sexual energy which is
the only force in the universe, beyond friendship and intellectual
bonding, strong enough to overcome the artificial boundary of
monogamous coupledom that separates, isolates, and imprisons us. If we
let sex out of the box, among the politically awake, at least in
theory, then We would initiate a new love paradigm of togetherness,
devotion and oneness. Given the selfishness that presently prevails in
the dominate Culture, I do not think that free love outside of a safe
progressive political context is the best strategy for social change,
but if it was combined with the very best political intentions and
actions, then non-exclusive sexual love would become a vehicle that
carries us upward and onward, a groundswell for a new politics of
vitality, adventure, and joy.
There is nothing young adults care about more than sexual love. Giving
our politics a sexual dimension would draw them into a Movement
(waiting to happen) far more powerfully than anything else, including
ideas and ideals for ending world poverty, disease, genocide and
ecocide. Sexual energy is the lifeblood of any social and political
gathering, and if it is overly restrained and weakened by unnecessary
and unquestioned customs and conventions, then frustration and boredom
result, leaving only duty-bound morality to motivate people beyond ego
and little family concerns, which has never been enough, and never will
be enough, to save the world. In contrast, the battle cry, “refuse
monogamy in favor of sexual-love-politics for world transformation,”
would certainly get and hold their attention, not to mention the
attention of the media, and it could lead to a global youth revolution
that finally rejects the false masters whose only joy is suffering unto
death.
Not just the young, but all adults have an inalienable right to a rich
and diverse erotic life, but it is no where to be found in this ascetic
culture, not in our mental-politics, and not in our false
(desexualized) spirituality that believes that Enlightenment comes from
leaving behind the physical (the human body and the larger body of
earth). The sad truth is that Americans cannot handle sex, not in our
politics and not in our spirituality because we are infected with the
“idea” of it as something dirty, shameful, or violent. The word
“spirit” stands for the integration and evolution of the total human
being, which means that the 3 dimensions of human existence (sexuality,
love, and knowledge) comprise a balanced whole in which each part is
playing its proper role and getting its own just desert. I am not
proposing (or condemning) free sex (for fun or recreation) for anyone,
but I am saying that small circles of individuals who practice an
integral politics that refuses to disregard or minimize any vital
aspect of the human animal could begin a new society that everyone
(sane) will eventually join.
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1:35:17 PM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
