The individual vs the movement

Looking at our American heroes

Lately I have been reading a lot of American history. Specifically around figures that we look up to as heroes. People like George Washington, Samuel Adams, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B Anthony. I had not looked closely into the lives of these individuals until now, assuming that the narratives we accept perfectly capture the nuance of their leadership. I hadn’t quite considered that these people individually found freedom before becoming leaders, and that this was a very individual act within themselves. What I mean is that Samuel Adams and George Washington made themselves free before the British left. Frederick Douglass and Susan B Anthony fit this pattern, too. By rejecting the narrative they found themselves in and defining their own, they became free before anyone else stood beside them or decided to rescue them.

We have this false narrative that it’s the other way around. That we achieve freedom externally, through fighting and war. In this version, one might imagine these heroes were up against the British army or their masters or—in the case of Anthony—men. But I would argue the real enemy they found was themselves. Their complacency with who they were or who they were becoming in the systems they lived in.

For example, Samuel Adams under the pseudonym Candidus in the Boston Gazette in October of 1771 writes:

Instead of sitting down satisfied with the efforts we have already made, which is the wish of our enemies, the necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance.

One would expect a Zen buddhist monk to say these things. They are the fruits of meditation. But what really caught me off guard was something Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1845 memoir, recalling his “descent” into slavery: “you have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” Keep in mind that Douglas was born a slave. His fall into slavery, he explains, was not at birth but when he allowed another to strip him of his dignity:

Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute.

He had lost the fortitude and perseverance that Samuel Adams identified as key ingredients to freedom. But then in becoming free, even before becoming free on paper, he says:

My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.

I could write for hours about my findings, but they are not my motivation here. What I want to say is that it’s far too easy to allow our surroundings to dictate who we are and who we become. If we are complacent about what we are, people more active in that pursuit will decide for us.

Reiterating a point in my last post, I would think twice about claiming that there is a king in our country if we can’t see the king in ourselves. When there is a king there are subjects. And if I haven’t made myself king, I have made myself a subject through my own complacency. That decision—who I am—has been made for me already because someone else has claimed the throne—who they are. Worse would be to claim that throne for someone else, without them doing so. At this point I can’t say for sure which camp we collectively fall into on the subject of a hypothetical king. But citizens that see a king should recognize that as a call to claim their own personhood.

The catch is that if I’m against what I see as a king, I’m fighting to free myself from the grip of something beyond me. But I have no control over that thing beyond me, only myself. So I start to wonder, what power do I have regardless of what’s in front of me? And I could think and think and think my way around this. Or I could start to listen to whatever I, myself, have to say instead of what the hypothetical king in front of me says. Better yet, if I believed there was a king out there I could imagine that the king in front of me exists somewhere in me or rather my body and work with the idea there.

I will give you an example of how this might work on the subject of subjects:

When I sit quietly and allow myself to feel the complacency and disconnection that many have towards the nonpartisan idea of democracy my throat starts to feel dry and cracked to the point that I can barely breathe, let alone speak. A vision of a cracked dry desert takes over my mind, and as I look at that desert I can see that it is waiting for water.

But the longer I look at this scene, it’s clear to me that the desert needs no water. It is a desert. Capable of surviving the harshest climate. The desert does not exist at the mercy of the seasons. It does not hide from the summer or the winter. It can never be conquered or defeated by the weather. And it certainly doesn’t become any smaller when circumstances change. It is completely free, because it knows what it is—refusing to be defined by anything outside.

Now, this desert—which appeared to me through the throat as a representation of social complacency around democracy—is a reminder that I, regardless of what others are doing, have a voice and a vision that, when used, allow me to claim my own freedom. But it is also a reminder that I have an individual decision to make—to opt out of using my voice and claiming who I am or to opt in to that. This is the choice that we have to make moreso than fighting against something outside of us that we believe to be the enemy. We are our enemy. Do not fall for anything else.