As I watch the denouement via the News I am paying particular attention to a detail concerning individual action. I’ll give an example. Standing quietly alongside Trump at his disastrous recent conference on Tuesday was Senator O’Connell’s wife, who is Transportation Secretary. She believed the conference was to be about policy concerning infrastructure. Trump pivoted away into his belligerent madness and her sober message to the country was lost. After watching this, I had the following imagination:
I am the Secretary. I know who Trump is and what he is capable of. I’ve see him in action before with reporters. I quietly write my letter of resignation and slip it into my pocket, just in case. I am anticipating the arrival of a Moment. As I now watch Trump spiral into his attack dog mode, I realise the Moment has arrived. The Moment of a decision! I quietly turn around and began to walk away. Trump spirals towards me, threateningly and says, “You’re fired”. I take out my letter of resignation and say, “But Sir, I have already resigned.” Released into my new freedom I hand my letter not to Trump but to the free Press. It says …. (write your own letter if you like).
We can see day after day, individuals in power arriving at such Moments and contracting back into conformity, refusing the decision. Quailing before imagined political consequences, they shrink back from the abyss, another Moment passes and another nail in the collective coffin is driven home. The kind of decision I am talking about is not an ordinary decision serving the interest of ego but is of another order altogether. It comes as its having already been decided, deep within one’s being—at that place where we are united with the world.[1] All that remains is the carrying out of that decision. And of course the individual must responsibly bear the full moral weight of that decision. Such a decision involves our bodies, or as I prefer, our animal being, i.e. the ‘place’ where we unite with the interior of the world–that ‘place’ we derisively refer to as our instincts.
Elie Wiesel gives us a clue.[2] He participated at a conference following the TV movie, The Day After, a post-nuclear vision of the world (1983). While all the other pundits were calculative in their assessments and suggestions how to avoid such a catastrophe, Wiesel asks a simple question (paraphrasing from memory): “Can we base a decision ‘simply’ on the feelings of revulsion and horror that rise up in us when we imagine the end of the world?” His voice was quickly drowned out as they went back to their calculations.
Now we can ask Wiesel’s question again. As these Moments arise, gathering momentum as we speed towards the abyss, can individuals in power make such a “Wiesel” decision—one that unites our animal being with our human consciousness? How many will continue instead to weasel their way out? Such decision is made on behalf of Life because this kind of decision unites us with Life. As with the imagined Secretary, there will be consequences to the personal lives of those individuals who so decide, but whatever those personal consequences are, they are vastly outweighed by that Moment in which the individual and world are united and the person becomes a mouthpiece on behalf of the World or Life.
As we watch this accelerating denouement you will see Moment after Moment arriving and subsiding back into oblivion as those in power refuse the call in favour of self-preservation, even as the preservation of all species becomes further jeopardised. Watch also for those few individuals who arrive at their Moment and make the decision!
Lastly, just in case you may think I am being somewhat of an arm-chair pundit, I can assure you that I have made such a decision in my life, and the consequences to my personal life were indeed catastrophic, lasting many years. It was only after those years that I found the hidden treasure within that catastrophe—a deep trust in my own animal being and a fresh perception of the world based on what that animal being tells me via my body. If you want to read a little of my history in this regard, you may find a pdf copy of my book, The Imperative, here:
and a little essay about the phenomenon of such decisions here at my blog:
[1] A profound and amazing description of the process of discovering and carrying out the decision as already having been made deep within, can be found in C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra, Ch. 11. Fourteen pages are dedicated to this description: “The fate of the world really depended on how they behaved in the next few hours. The thing was irreducibly, nakedly real. … This he saw clearly but as yet he had no inkling of what he could do. …” (174-5)
[2] Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, at which time the Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a “messenger to mankind,” stating that through his struggle to come to terms with “his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler‘s death camps”, as well as his “practical work in the cause of peace”, Wiesel had delivered a message “of peace, atonement and human dignity” to humanity.
