The Bad-hearted Sovereign Citizen
I have read many essays which, though presenting much valuable
technical insight, also present apparently unintended rationalization of tea
dumping anarchy, what I call bad-hearted sovereignty. The writers threaten
the life meaning of strangers. I think this may be the single greatest
impediment to acceptance, by the current public, of the drive for individual
dignity that inspired the American revolution. This appears to go even
deeper than forms of disrespect that some of the writers debate about.
I think the issue hangs on the management of facilitating everybody
being lost in their own private drama, everybody having fun, and everybody
somehow retaining a capacity for deep personal friendship.
Everyone I know clearly expresses to me a conviction that their
personal dignity requires maintaining a one person life story, what I
call being utterly self-centered. Self-centeredness looks pretty
undignified to me and I am convinced that an apparently one person drama
that evokes actual feeling must logically have other players, but over the
last several years I have adapted to the general demand from my associates
to allow each person to keep their illusion of solitary drama.
Significantly this adaptation has involved the emergence of a tradition of
headless collective authority in my household, in the local neighborhood,
and at a cafe that some friends of mine set up.
The root of the problem, in my understanding of things, is that
melodramatic love, as I believe women generally define it, is a direct
human rights violation of the loved person. Love in this sense is the
invention of a melodramatic storyline for life that includes a character
part for both the lover and the loved person. I believe that this is why
teenage rebellion is so routine in so many cultures and why men on the make
get such a bad rap in the media; active love towards a child or a sexually
attractive person can feel quite rotten to the loved person. Only a very
wise person who knows me quite well can invent a character for me that
preserves my own image of my life character within their storyline.
Examples of melodramatic love without technical creative strangulation have
been quite rare in my life, and so I've generally related to expressions of
love toward me as either a threat or a kind of sparring.
Though love showing may be a threat, love in motion is an attack, in my
view, regardless of the lover's intent; so I think government may very well
be genuine patriotic love in motion. I am also convinced that love never
ever gets inspired by evil or bad intent; that no-one will ever write me
specifically into the movie of their life without the last line being "and
they lived happily ever after". I am convinced that P.T. Barnum and the
Illuminati and the common shoplifters and the neighbors that keep trying to
get me busted are striving to create a long term outcome of real human
majesty in which their concept of my "better self" will blossom. That they
are full of shit does not in my view mean that they are evil; it means that
they are courageously putting their heart expression into the world we share
and, due I think to self-pity, leaving it up to me to see it that way;
though I instead generally see only the technical effects, and get pissed
off.
I observe that, over time, all parents and lovers get better at
presenting their expressions as pure expressions, without technical effects,
so as to avoid angering and likely losing the loved one. I call this the
maturing of the human race. Thus I believe that it is in the interest of
those who love me that I defend myself from the tragedy they cause, and
equally vital, for my own well being, that I somehow contrive to receive
their expression. I believe that to forbid all love expression that has
technical effects has for me been a kind of psychic suicide and is quite
unnecessary for someone of average intelligence. I don't give importance to
my anger and I don't get even; I do my best to get out of the way and find a
constructive form of response that overtly recognizes the loving person's
concept of their own intent.
My mother has often referred to herself as the dragon mother in
relation to my two sisters and I, and I think it's a useful image. I spent
a lot of my childhood and part of my adulthood deliberately hiding from
her, and she likewise hid from me and my sisters. Even today we remain
virtually strangers. My younger sister often refers to our childhood as a
sort of concentration camp. Oddly I generally feel that everyone in my
family is quite afraid of me also, and of each other; and at present we have
established our lives thousands of miles apart, timidly visiting
occasionally. It is my understanding that, in America, this is entirely
normal.
As a child I took this all to imply the complete absense of love in our
family, though all the others disputed my view. I presumed that, logically,
love and terrorism should be opposites. Certainly this is the common
Sovereign Citizen view of political relationships. But in my old age I have
heard and read so many directly contradicting intensely patriotic viewpoints,
and seen so many people I've sincerely loved turn away from my fond regard
in disgust, that I must logically separate intent and effect. I have decided
that my parents are not sadistic predators and I am not a psychic parasite.
More to the point the cops who jailed me for ignoring a citation for
carrying too much on my motorcycle really believed I would loathe a world of
people as creatively reckless as myself; and they were rescuing me from such
a fate; they were inspired by the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would
have others do unto you.
In respect for the same rule, I overtly encourage creative recklessness
at my house, to the dismay of some local parents. I also never respond
affirmatively to a beggar's request for change, though many of my
associates have remarked about their need to, based on this same ethic.
So; are the police, who daily risk evoking senseless hysterical rage in
people like me, being loving? Am I with the beggars? Are they who give the
beggars spare change?
I've decided that logic demands the answer that we all are; that even
the kids who shoot their classmates are driven by the irresistable drive to
be somehow genuinely constructive with their lives, to use their creative
spirit to make a better world even at the cost of their own life. The
competitive social humiliation of the average school or large corporation
looks very seriously sinister to me, and the administrations of all the
schools I've been in lead the nightmare by example. The crisis looks
genuine to me and I do nothing, I have no ideas. Am I more loving than the
kook with the gun? I think so, but I don't say so with much confidence. I
don't think of Patrick Henry as being very loving of our country either,
but I'm likewise without confidence.
Nasty technical consequences sure feel like hatred on the receiving end
but most of my pure expression goes unnoticed or totally misunderstood.
Given his level of social ineptitude and emotional immaturity, could Ted
Kaczinski's ideas have become a common topic without him murdering anybody?
I sure hope so, but I can't say so with real confidence. I am 41, and it
sure looks like my love will die mostly unrecognized. I think maybe like
Mr. kaczinski I am hamstrung by social formality; lacking sophistication in
both awareness and expression, I miss the mark when I make a bid to share
life meaning with another person, so I'm a serious failure as a social
competitor.
Creative technical recklessness looks like the only potential trump
that I or the other emotionally ignorant people have for getting noticed by
those we love in the commercially entertained society around me.
Looking at the plight of people trying to goodheartedly share life with
me, I imagine a vast world of desperate unnoticed lovers of my country or
even me personally, occillating between catatonic self-pity and being a damn
nuisance in my life. I define the Sovereign challenge to be to somehow find
the means to be so well protected that I escape being angry at them and yet
have the opportunity to really perceive the nobility and internal kindness
that gets them out of bed in the morning and controls their influence on my
life. If I succeed, then I am inspired to my own active interest in them
and wrestle with the unintended human rights violations and hysteria that I
cause.
Fun as Life Meaning
The moral debate about various forms of what people call fun looks to
me like the same issue seen from a totally different angle. I have arrived
at a definition of fun as being the euphoric feeling that arises when I'm
apprehensive or even outright frightened but somehow not inspired to worry
or objectively assess the details of my situation. This happens to me only
while in my feminine identity with direct benevolent male support or in a
fidelitous group of three or more while not being a benevolent male for any
women. Thus it looks to me like the core of the stress between men and
women as well as being a large scale political problem.
Emotional Trust
This essay is also about those who unintentionally promote religious
hysteria, avoidance of intimacy and general human grimness by advocating a
political coalition against some forms of human expression instead of
presenting their political resistance as a solitary person.
I have explored in my life many different political and quasi-political
coalitions, resisting various forms of troublesome activity or creating new
projects. Regardless of rhetoric, all political coalitions I've been in
have focused both ways and soured me on both concepts. Positive projects
have always turned out to be so different in the several people's
dreamworlds that no amount of additional rhetoric can prevent serious
bitterness; but even more worrisome to me has been the apparent effect of
politically unifying against something. The group formally rationalizes
some class of character assassination or killing of magical dreaming which
spooks all members of the group to get very secret about their own
confusions, hysterias and hopes related to anyone else. Even if this fear
seems convincingly groundless I have been unable to win real trust with a
member of such a group, whether or not I'm in the group. If the group
actually succeeds in it's moral war effort, the paranoia solidifies into
religious escapism that even the desolution of the group cannot resolve;
and, with no hope possible for deep human sharing, unthinkable acts become
possible in moments of rage or despair.
As part of the Quaker tradition I saw a lot of attempts to engage
political resistance without use of the words or actions of physical
violence, but the paranoia effect was just as intense and frustrating and
paralyzing. I have come to a point where I will not participate in any
decision-making at a meeting ever again.
Return to Homepage"