The Parallel Polis, or How to Beat the Technocracy

In my book Transfiguration, I write about various possible alternatives to the sterile and anti-human, anti-sophianic institutions that surround us. For one, I propose the idea of “the sophianic hedge school” as a healthy alternative to Education, Inc. that has done so much to ruin human flourishing and poison society. I also floated the idea of perishable currency, inspired by both Rudolf Steiner and Guido Preparata. This is to say nothing about the importance of the CSA (“Community Supported Agriculture”) movement as well as the availability of herd shares as a way to secure clean food and dairy products uncompromised by the death-bestowing toxins of BigAg and the diabolical interventions of BigPharma that follow in their wake. What I propose in that book is a kind of alternate society, almost, as I’ve written in this blog, like the invisible society within society that operates almost like the parallel universes found in the novels of Philip K. Dick.

I am not the first one to suggest such movements, of course, but in my ongoing consternation at the increasing totalization of the Governmental-Pharmaceutical-Technocratic paradigm, I have found myself reexamining the responses of earlier (but not that much earlier) generations when faced with such menacing totalitarian structures. As I’ve mentioned before, Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind is a great place to start if one wants to trace the gradual acquiescence of more or less good people to the will of the corporatocracy’s insidious egregore. In such scenarios (and this was also the case in England’s gradual transformation from a Catholic into a Protestant nation in the 16th and 17th centuries), the Archons first work on the middle-manager class—the intellectuals, professors, teachers, prelates, and so forth—trusting that they will lead the rest of society into a brave new world.

I also revisited the writing of Václav Havel. I probably first heard of Havel when I was in high school and he was a Czechoslovakian playwright and dissident imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain in his homeland. Some years later in one of my first major publications as a poet (in the journal Cross Currents), I was very proud to find my work alongside an interview with Havel in which he argued that a “sense for the transcendent” was the only hope for uniting multicultural and multifarious societies. This time, however, I revisited his essential essay, “The Power of the Powerless.”

“The Power of the Powerless” was written in 1978, long before the Iron Curtain showed any signs of cracking. But crack it did. Havel and his compatriots in the Eastern Bloc at that time were advocating for “parallel structures” or a “parallel polis” (the term contributed by his fellow dissident Václav Benda) as ways for peoples under whatever form of oppression (things were very different in Poland than in Czechoslovakia, for instance). For Havel, the lynchpin for such an undertaking is the ability to “live in truth,” since the Communist governments were notorious for lies, not that modern Western democracies are any better), what led in the USSR to “hypernormalization” (i.e.. “everybody knows everything is a lie, but let’s all act like it isn’t”).

According to Benda, “the mission of the parallel polis is constantly to conquer new territory, to make its parallelness constantly more substantial and more present. Politically, this means to stake out clear limits for totalitarian power, to make it more difficult for it to maneuver” [1]. This parallel polis was envisioned as primarily cultural, as in the arts, but also social. It simply had to do with giving up on the lie and living in truth (I think of Pope John Paul II, when still a Polish cardinal, leading a procession through the streets of Krakow with an empty frame since it was illegal to process with a religious image, in this case of the Virgin). As Ivan Jirous writes in “Parallel Polis,” “Those who take part are active people who can no longer stand to look passively at the general decay, marasmus, rigidity, bureaucracy, and suffocation of every living idea or sign of movement in the official sphere” [2]. How these words resonate today.

Havel extends this:

“The point where living within the truth ceases to be a mere negation of living and becomes articulate in a particular way, is the point at which something is born that might be called the ‘independent spiritual, social, and political society.’” [3]

I think our own moment calls for such a rebirth, much in the way the Dark Ages presaged the coming of Hildegard of Bingen, Thomas Aquinas, and Francis of Assisi or the waning of the Middle Ages opened onto the Florentine Renaissance. Surely the second coming is at hand.

I have been waiting, in vain as it turns out, for some Distributists or Communitarians to step up and be counted at this, their moment. But...no. They seem either to have retreated into their pipes and ale or become Catholic Marxists or worse.

But part of the problem is the overarching tyranny of our technology, a technology that has so aided the Archons in their quest for totalizing power. Havel—like Heidegger, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, and so many others—was onto this. In 1978, he wrote,

“Technology—that child of modern science, which in turn is a child of modern metaphysics—is out of humanity’s control, has ceased to serve us, has enslaved us and compelled us to participate in the preparation of our own destruction…. We look on helplessly as that coldly functioning machine we have created inevitably engulfs us, tearing us away from our natural affiliations (for instance, from our habitat in the widest sense of the word, including our habitat in the biosphere) just as it removes us from the experience of ‘being’ and casts us into the world of ‘existences.’” [4]

I will submit that part of the instinctive resistance we have to “lockdown culture” resides precisely in such a sensibility. A Zoom meeting with nature, even human nature, is not possible.

Like Havel, his exact contemporary Ivan Illich also saw what technology (not to mention modern medicine!) was doing to us. “If tools are not controlled politically,” he writes, “they will be managed in a belated technocratic response to disaster. Freedom and dignity will continue to dissolve into an unprecedented enslavement of man to his tools” [5]. It’s almost as if he were watching us. I can only imagine what he and Havel are thinking.

Havel, for example, observed the trajectory upon which even Western democracies were headed:

“It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they, too, are being helplessly dragged along by it.” [6]

Bingo.

We have many ways to build our own parallel polis. We can extricate ourselves as much as possible from the technocracy and their flunkies in government and simply live. At Stella Matutina Farm (where I live), for example, we rely almost entirely on traditional tools (with the exception of a few modern contraptions like my chainsaws). We mow some of our grass, but the cattle take care of most of it. And what we do is not an anomaly: most sustainable farmers employing no-dig methods operate pretty much the same way—and even our tiny 1.5 acre garden supplies an enormous amount of food.

But even more, our idea of a parallel polis extends to the social sphere, in particular in the ways we celebrate the Christian year. We observe all the feasts, but our biggest celebration occur at May Day and Michaelmas. At May Day this year, when our state was still under various mandates and most social activities were suppressed by government and, alas, the Church, a friend asked if she could invite some of her friends who were starving for conviviality. Surprisingly, over fifty people—mostly families—showed up to dance around the maypole and feast together. This is what a parallel polis looks like. It may not be much, but it certainly fits what Jiří Dienstbier described as something contributing to “the continual renewal of the meaning of authenticity” [7]. Bureaucracy may be death by a thousand papercuts, but the parallel polis—by which I mean “a sophiological structure”—bestows life by a thousand tiny, some might even say “insignificant,” gestures. Even our recent forays into house church can be seen as an example of this. “The failure of the modern experiment,” as H.J. Massingham so cogently observed, “is seen to be so because it is anti-Christian, anti-natural, and anti-realistic” [8].

It’s not hard. Live in truth.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

1. Václav Benda, et al., “Parallel Polis, or an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe: An Inquiry,” Social Research 55, nos. 1-2 (Spring/Summer 1988): 211-46, at 219.

2. Ibid., 228.

3. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless” in Living in Truth, ed. Jan Vladislav (Faber and Faber, 1986), 85.

4. Ibid., 114.

5. Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (Harper, 1973), 12.

6. “The Power of the Powerless,” 116.

7. “Parallel Polis,” 231.

8. H.J. Massingham, The Tree of Life (London, 1943), 173.

Smash the Technocracy

Sophiology is about as far away from the idea of a technocracy as is conceivable. In my book Transfiguration I discuss this polarity in terms of Sophia and Ahriman. Sophia, as anyone familiar with my books or this blog knows, is the handmaid and coworker of the Lord, revealed in scripture, among other places, in Proverbs 8 where she describes herself in intimate terms with him: “when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master workman”(19-20) and in Luke 1 when the Virgin responds to the archangel that she is the “handmaid of the Lord” (38). Ahriman, on the other hand, is the Anti-Sophia who hates the Lord and wishes to turn everyone and everything into a data set ready to optimized and subsumed into the anti-cosmos. Rudolf Steiner, who used the Zoroastrian name “Ahriman” to identify the spirit working through the technological, described this phenomenon in these words:

“In his technical machines of the economic sphere the human being will perceive that, although he constructed and made them, they nevertheless gradually take on a life of their own—a life certainly which he can still deny because they manifest themselves to begin with only in the economic sphere. But he will notice more and more in what he himself creates that it gains a life of its own and that, despite the fact that he brought it forth from the intellect, the intellect itself can no longer comprehend it…. People will discover, in fact, how the objects of their industry (Wirtschaft) become the bearers of demons.” [1]

In recent news, transhumanism, which had been percolating under the cultural radar for decades, has been rebranded as a societal good, whether through various medical interventions to combat viruses, through similar medical interventions devised to alter one’s identity, or through other applications that seek to permanently connect human biology to the “internet of things.” Strangely, these developments are being proposed by the very powerful, and many people seem to be going along with it—ironically, these are the same people who were blaming these powerful figures for all the evils of Capitalism and the instrumentalization of human beings for control and profit not two years ago. For my part, I have rather a hard time believing that the people who’ve been destroying the planet and human societies for the past century will be the same people to save us from their disastrous projects. Only a fool could buy that. We have no shortage of fools, alas, but fear can make even the best of people do foolish things

In Transfiguration, I note that “as the World of Ahriman more and more encroaches upon the business of being human, more and more compromises being human and turns it into a business, the World of Sophia, the Wisdom that God poured forth upon all his works (Sirach 1:9), more and more reveals itself as the antidote to his madness.” But how do we access the World of Sophia?

First of all, by extricating ourselves from the World of Ahriman. Let’s turn the non serviam back on him. Extrication happens by non-participation, as our Amish brothers and sisters exemplify so well. The Amish, contrary to popular stereotypes, use telephones, even cellphones (the Amish carpenter who put my roof on has a nicer cellphone than I do). The difference is that they don’t let their phones use them.

Another method is by returning to the Creation. When we’ve been herded into virtual spaces, it’s easy to forget our connection to Natura. Learn how to pay attention to the Real. Develop an awareness of where the planets are in the heavens at any given moment of the day. You can start with just the moon. Where in the heavens above or below the earth is it right now? Do you know? What phase is it in? Note the subtle changes in your consciousness after doing this for a few weeks.

Attending to the subtle changes in the flora and fauna in your area works in a similar way. How is the apple tree (or grape vine, or rose bush, or lilac bush, and so forth) different today from yesterday? from last week? How does your attention alter your being?

Not participating in the World of Ahriman is the best medicine, though, of course, in this day and age, it is nearly impossible to completely divorce ourselves from the “net” (perhaps the perfect metaphor). But participation in the World of Sophia is without a doubt the antidote to the World of Ahriman. Maybe if we called the World of Sophia a vaccine more people would try it. At least post-menopausal women wouldn’t start having miraculous periods again (is anything more fitting an image of the diabolical parody of fertility, this anti-fertility?).

Another way, and perhaps one of the most practical, is to not participate in the “food” distributions system of the World of Ahriman. Join a biodynamic or organic CSA. Buy a stake in a herdshare to give yourself access to milk that’s still alive. Get to know farmers. Buy as much of your food as possible directly from them (farmers markets are okay, but they’re often of more benefit to the municipalities hosting them than to the farmers, who get fee’d to death by participating). Start a garden.

Once you start doing these kinds of things, you’ll notice you are less and less a part of the World of Ahriman and more and more a part of the World of Sophia. Sophia’s world is inhabited by people in community with animals, plants, and the land; by community with saints, angels, and God. Sophia is the bridge between these worlds.

The Ahrimanic, however, becomes enraged by such things. It wheels out various methods of curtailing life: taxes, regulations, any number of proscriptions intended to disable or destroy the wholesome and deliver the unwary into the waiting tentacles of the technocracy.

This way of smashing the technocracy boils down to generally ignoring it, or ignoring it as much as possible, and by loving each other, the land, and the beings which inhabit it in a gesture of absolute generosity and care. By so doing, we return to the place promised in Proverbs 8, when Sophia was “by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the children of men. Now therefore hearken unto me, O ye children: for blessed are they that keep my ways” (30-32).

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Garden.

1. Rudolf Steiner, The New Spirituality and the Christ Experience of the Twentieth Century, trans. Paul King (London / Hudson, NY: Rudolf Steiner Press / Anthroposophic Press, 1988), 82.

The Vulnerable and the Powerful

There are lots of ways in which one could describe the cultural metamorphoses of the past year. “The Year of Plague,” for example, or “The Rise of the Archons” (much more accurate than “The Great reset”) would be good choices, though I also find delight in calling it “The Revenge of the Nerd in the Pastel Sweater.” But I think the most accurate description would be to call this “The Time of the Vulnerable and the Powerful.”

That might seem pretty simple and straightforward, but it’s not. Since the beginning of lockdowns and various mandates and restrictions, I have been more concerned about the threats to working people and the working poor than I have been about the threat or spread of illness. Not that I’m not unconcerned about illness. My eighty-four-year-old mother, a vulnerable though scrappy auburn-haired Irishwoman who suffers from dementia, lives with me and I was concerned early on that she might get ill. Thankfully, she hasn’t—not even a cold—but living on a farm, eating organic food, drinking clean water, and being around children with sketchy hand-washing habits all the time seems to have bolstered her immune system. When she was in a nursing home before she moved in with us six years ago, she was ill all the time and in the hospital almost quarterly—the caretakers thought she’d die within months under our “unprofessional care.” It’s more than possible that she would have died, of loneliness if not illness, had she still been in the hands of “the professionals” over the past year. But I have also seen friends and family members profoundly impacted, if not permanently damaged (time will tell), from the psychological ramifications of the past year’s events. This is to say nothing of the countless numbers of people who lost businesses (my favorite music store in a nearby town not the least among them) or livelihoods due to the issue of our times.

I know many people, dedicated people of all faiths among them, who know we have a mandate to protect the vulnerable and the powerless. Psalm 82 is explicit about this mandate, employing the imperative tense:

Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy.

Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked.

They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness:

all the foundations of the earth are out of course. (3-5)

All the foundations of the earth are out of course.

What bothers me, though, is how this desire to protect the vulnerable has resulted in the surrender of the wills and intellects of so many to the dictates of governments, NGOs, and other professional international bodies and authorities. The result is that many who profess a concern for the vulnerable now look as though their real allegiance is with the powerful. And don’t think the powerful haven’t noticed. We all know about the great transfer of wealth (bottom to top) that occurred over the past year. But people seem to be okay with that in order to have the illusion of safety. They might grouse, of course, do a little social media posturing, but nobody seems to care enough to act against, or at least to resist, the ever-increasing power and insatiable appetites of the archons.

So I guess my problem is that I don’t see how giving the powerful more power protects the vulnerable. Shouldn’t the vulnerable be the ones gaining more agency and power? They’re not. And now even those in the middle—not the most vulnerable (though still vulnerable) but lacking in any kind of power—are likewise under threat from the powerful.

For these and other reasons, I prefer a kind of Christian anarchism, similar, but not identical, to that of my Amish neighbors (I write about this in my book Transfiguration) that while it doesn’t completely destroy the concept of power at least dilutes it by distribution—a very communitarian/distributist ethos. We don’t have that. Still, as I have been arguing for a long time, we can inculcate such a sensibility at the micro-level. That is, not by trying to change “The System,” but by changing ourselves and our relationships to the worlds around us.

Power is a tool of Satan (it was what he used to tempt the Master), though people, as they mobilize and think in groups, tend to like the idea of a strong authority. It gives them a feeling of security (how often that word comes up as of late!) The ancient Israelites, looking around the cultures of the Levant, saw that their neighbors had strong kings, and, in their mimetic desire, the Israelites wanted one, too. After their begging and pleading (or, better, whining) Yahweh gave them enough rope to hang themselves, but not without a warning:

“These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” (1 Samuel 8:11-18)

They hung themselves, and we are pretty much following suit. This is also why I think those Catholic traddies out there styling themselves “monarchists” (particularly those in the New World) are completely full of you-know-what and cling to their bogus idea of “Christendom” out of an impoverished notion of what it means to be a Christian. Jesus didn’t come as a king. His kingdom is not of this world (and by “this world,” please don’t make the mistake of thinking he meant the created world—he was talking about the realm of Satan and those in league with him to gain control over the vulnerable and everything else. I’m sure you can find fitting examples in your social media feed). People have often asked me over this past strange year what we should do. In fact, I hear from people on this topic almost daily. To quote J.C. Crawford’s legendary introduction to the MC5 on their classic album Kick out the Jams (I am from Detroit, after all), “The time has come for each and every one of you to decide, whether you are gonna be the problem, or whether you are gonna be the solution.” You must choose, brothers and sisters, you must choose.

But I don’t think this is a political problem at all (politics, actually is the problem). As my beloved Simone Weil observed, “It is not religion but revolution that is the opium of the people.” Ours is a spiritual problem, and a pressing one at that. This kind can only be cast out by prayer.

It is in this register that I believe the invocation of St. Michael the Archangel, called by Valentin Tomberg “the Archistrategist,” is more than appropriate at our moment. The Celtic tradition relied upon the intercession of the archangel, as in these lines from the Welsh “Litany of Creation”:

I beseech you by the tenth order on the compact earth. I beseech praiseworthy Michael to help me against demons.

Together with Michael, I beseech you by land and by sea unceasingly; I beseech you respectfully by every quality of God the Father.

I beseech you, O Lord, by the suffering of your body, white with fasting; I beseech you by the contemplative life, I beseech you by the active life.

I beseech the people of heaven, with Michael, for my soul; I beseech the saints of the world to help me on earth.

I beseech the people of heaven with bright-armed Michael; I beseech you by the triad of wind, sun, and moon.

Note the yoking of the contemplative and active lives.

Another useful prayer is the Byzantine Akathist to Michael the Archangel. We prayed this prior to one Michaelmas festival in our barn a couple years ago. It is intense. Here’s a passage:

“Standing before the Throne of God, O Archangel Michael, you are entirely in the heights and yet you are not far from men and women below on the earth. You ever fight against the enemies of mankind’s salvation. It is fitting, for all who wish to reach the long-desired homeland of Heaven, to call on you with one accord:

“Hail, leader of the thrice-holy hymn of the angels.

Hail, ever-ready advocate and guardian of those on earth.

Hail, mighty defender of those who speak truth and live by mercy.

Hail, for in a strange manner, you struck down Pharaoh with his faithless Egyptians in their ponderous pride.

Hail, for you gloriously led the Jews in their wandering through the wilderness.

Hail, for you quenched the flame of the fiery furnace of Babylon for the three youths.

Hail, Michael, Supreme Commander with all the hosts of Heaven.”

There are other prayers, of course. Besides Psalm 82, there are also St. Patrick’s Breastplate and, obviously, the secret weapon of the rosary—and many others. If you want to align yourself with power, this is the place to look, not to archons growing fat and rich on your fear.

Fear, to speak plainly, is a luxury of the faithless and if unchecked it only spreads like a cancer. As you can no doubt see, it has metastasized all over the planet. But this is not a luxury the Christian can afford. We cannot avoid that messengers of Satan will torment us, with fear as much as disease; it is part of the human condition this side of the Parousia. Saint Paul found this out through experience, not theory:

“...I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Corinthians 12:7-10)

We are all vulnerable, praise God. So take up your armor of light.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Garden.