I’m always looking for the a priori functions, the deeper patterns at work behind the appearances, something nearer to the great fulcrum of events, because those of us working for positive and lasting social and cultural change always seem to be trying to push down on the short end of the lever. Looking for a priori assumptions, those that come before, is not always well-received by people who are primarily motivated by decisive action but, in fact, taking time to identify the assumptions operating beneath the surface can dramatically increase the effectiveness of that action. Both action and reflection are non-negotiable requirements. Both are more informed by intuition than reason ever wants to admit. More importantly, both action and reflection need to be paths with a heart (says Casteneda), and, as Pascal quipped, “The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.”
A few months back on this site there was a series of essays describing a complex boolean-logical process (complete with flow-chart diagrams) for identifying the root causes of any given social or political issue. In my view, the writer’s intentions were excellent, and the process was designed to mitigate the sheer amount of time and effort wasted in hacking away at consequences rather than causes. I also found the process to be cumbersome and, judging from many of the comments, inaccessible to many of the readers. In that writer’s view, intuition had absolutely no part whatsoever in the process (it was considered an impediment), and yet it seemed clear, to me anyway, that there were actually quite a few intuitive a priori assumptions/functions active in the “root cause” selection process, a kind of intuitive pre-screening that guided the selection of causes and effects before they even made it into the boolean process. In my view, identifying a priori assumptions is more of an intuitive process than some are willing to admit or allow, but whether it is admitted or allowed, it’s there anyway, a priori. What makes individual intuition workable is the course-correction provided by a community of the adequate (persons who know what they are talking about), and we should not be afraid of either intuition or community. Intuition, analogy, and metaphor give us ways of bootstrapping ourselves into paths of thought and understanding that would not otherwise be available to us.
Here are two (and only two) a priori functions I (and others) have been able to identify as operating behind and through our current political processes, along with some suggestions for next steps. I’m not offering a program for salvation. If the identification of these a priori assumptions/functions is accurate, it will indicate where the point of leverage may be most effective. This is to say, if each of the a priori assumptions/functions I describe is active enough in social and cultural contexts, then addressing the a priori (the cause) will be more effective than trying to address the effects of the a priori. Trying to address the effects is like pressing on the short side of a lever, trying to move a heavy weight sitting on the long end of the lever.
I am using the terms “function” and “assumption” interchangeably here, because in this case, the assumption is also what is functional. The a priori assumptions function to determine how an issue is framed. The a priori assumption, the framing, is the fulcrum, and where the fulcrum is placed determines the leverage. Move the fulcrum, change the framing, challenge the assumption, and you change the leverage. A priori assumptions/functions are tacit, not explicit, meaning they are mostly out of sight, and out of awareness. To the extend they remain hidden, they determine the leverage in any given situation. Another way of thinking about “leverage” is as “power.” Whoever controls the leverage has the power. I’ll say it again: the a priori function, or hidden prior assumption, is the fulcrum. Placement of the fulcrum determines which side of the lever has the power.
1.
One a priori function is that enough fear and scarcity will turn everyone against themselves, including the “base” of those creating the fear and scarcity. A house divided against itself cannot stand, and divisiveness is never constrained to “the other” house. Create enough fear, scarcity, and learned helplessness (the fulcrum), and a critical mass of people across the political spectrum—all houses—will regress into murder/suicide, while the masters of that war will sit on the spoils.
It does not matter to these masters if the House of Trump falls or the House of Biden falls, in fact, if they both fall it is all the better for the real power brokers (news flash: it’s not Trump or Biden). The strategy is to sow discontent, sow distrust, sow deception and dishonesty, sow doubt, and while everyone is scrambling with their hair on fire they can waltz in and take their pick of what’s there for the taking. Sow to the wind, and you reap a whirlwind, and in the aftermath of that whirlwind, private equity disaster capitalists will sweep in and buy up everything pennies on the dollar just as they did in New Orleans after whirlwind Katrina. If there is no natural disaster handy, they just create one. The tacit goals are ownership, power, and money for a few, while the many are fighting among ourselves for smaller and smaller scraps.
Next steps: Move the fulcrum, address the underlying fear of scarcity with the truth. What if that fear is just wrong, based on a set of erroneous a priori assumptions? Stop feeding the infection. Money is the lifeblood of greed. Stop buying anything that bleeds into the greedy, find a different path. The reality is, there is actually more than enough, the problem is not quantity, it’s distribution. There is plenty for all if we work together and do what we can to create the communities of trust and respect from where we are, with what we have. Doing so will require that we give up our own grasping, our clinging, our own fearful tendencies. How much do we really need? I saw a big sign on the back of a semi the other day. It read: “If you want to see fewer huge trucks clogging up the highway, stop buying so much shit.” What will private equity do when enough of us no longer need what they are peddling?
The way forward has been sketched out a hundred times over—voluntary simplicity, do-it-yourself, permaculture, local producers, farm markets and REKO rings, community food pantries, and responsible local businesses are better, more equitable, more sustainable ways to go, along with credit unions instead of big banks. Neighborhood associations and gatherings, and community gardens are excellent community projects and they can be found in the most unlikely places. Start a study circle at your local public library! To paraphrase President John F. Kennedy, “Ask not what your neighbors can do for you, ask instead what you can do for your neighbors, and, more importantly, ask what you and your neighbors can do together.”
2.
Another a priori function in USAmerica is messianism, and this one is huge. Too many forward-thinking persons are, perhaps without realizing it, looking for some kind of “progressive” messiah with god powers to defeat the Church of MAGA, greedy corporations, and corrupt courts. It is no different a dynamic than that of the true believers in messiah Trump, and that dynamic is exactly the problem. The dirty secret is that USAmerica is shot through with messianism, from the Pilgrim’s pride to Manifest Destiny to the Church of MAGA. We have, collectively, throughout our history, raised up and then crucified one savior after another on one cross or another. We fuss about presidential elections as if the candidates were running for the title of Savior of the World. Many progressive thinkers do not believe they are looking for a messiah with god powers, but functionally their behavior is the same as if they were doing so. We’re not so much involved in a tacit civil war or cultural war as we are involved in a religious war.
Next steps: Jettison the religious “true believer” fervor. Reject all messiahs by outing them. We do not need any more magic or mythic religion, including American Civil Religion (Robert Bellah). Democracy is at minimum a rational process built on the rule of law as well as on trans-rational values like life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, ideals and practices available to all persons who are equal under that rational governance. Democracy is not built on any ethnocentric, magic, or mythic ideology or religion. There are no saviors, no one person is going to make anything great again, it is a team effort and the result will be, at best, a little better, a little at a time with the occasional “punctuated equilibrium” leap ahead. The president is just a team leader, just a quarterback, nothing more. The choice before us is not messiah Trump or messiah Biden, it is Team Trump (i.e., the entire Project 2025 regression) or Team Democracy—the most viable way forward to government of the peoples, by the peoples, and for the peoples (and yes, I made the word people plural on purpose). It’s a team effort. And even that metaphor contains a hidden a priori— the assumption that it’s a tribal contest,a blood sport in which someone will win and someone will lose. That is a huge error, because in our current world, with that a priori, we the people all lose, there are no winners except the high priests of power and the masters of money.
No one is going to save us except we ourselves. Democracy is a way of life, a set of practices, a messy large-group collaboration, not dependent on any one person but benefiting from multi-disciplinary teams of both ordinary and extraordinary persons. It does not take a PhD or supernatural mystical powers to understand and practice the values of honesty, integrity, compassion, or justice, but it might also take persons with education and experience (as well as those right values) to make sound policy decisions at a level where they will actually be practical and effective. Democracy is bottom-up, not top-down, and yet some things can only be effectively done from the larger, national structures. Democracy is employee-owned companies, cooperatives, and joint ventures, yet even those home-grown enterprises need to respect global clean air, clean water, safe product, and fair labor regulations. Democracy is a way of life, it is a practice, it is imperfect and messy, and it has no use whatsoever for messianism of any kind.
Messianism is regressive tribalism. Regressive tribalism is indeed a collective “we,” but with we narrowly defined as my clan, my race, my tribe, to the exclusion of everyone else. There is powerful meaning, purpose, and identity baked into that kind of collective we. That kind of regressive tribalism is easy to see in movements like the Church of MAGA. Unfortunately, for too many progressives, “we” is still framed in terms of “my tribe,” and the primordial (I almost said infantile) yearning for that kind of connection is difficult to let go.
To be truly progressive, to be truly democratic, “we” cannot be tribal. “We” must be chosen, and it must transcend ethnocentric/ideological intolerance and messianism. We means “all of us” and even “all living things,” and not just my clan, my tribe, my racial/ethnic group. In this larger frame, “we” will never have the same kind of baked-in certainty and evangelistic power found in the tribe/clan/racial identity frame. It will have something far better and far more important: the only chance there is to move forward in creating a better world for ourselves and for all living things.
To sum up: It takes enormous time and effort trying to move heaven and earth from the short end of the lever. It can be done, but it’s like emptying the ocean with a teaspoon. Let me draw it out more clearly: plopped out on the long end of the lever is a huge sack containing all of current-reality culture, politics, and social systems/structures—a sack of shit, in other words. On the short end of the lever are the visionaries and progressives both historical and present, from the framers of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, to those who have been the core of great liberation and civil rights movements, to all of us currently working to advance the causes of peace, justice, and liberty for all. All who are working for positive change (stuff like a climate-future that actually sustains life on this planet) are clearly on the short end because that sack contains a lot of money and power, along with the hopes and fears of too many USAmericans who are afraid to lose what little they perceive they have, who feel weak, and who want someone strong to save them. Among those persons in the sack are also the lazy, the complacent, the immature, and the entitled. To the extent we ourselves are clinging to money, power-over, fear, weakness, learned helplessness, laziness, complacency, immaturity, or entitlement, we are more or less in that sack of shit, and being in it, we will never be able to move it.
Those of us on the short end will never generate enough force to move that sack. The only way is to move the fulcrum—that is, address the underlying fear, entitlement, and baked-in messianic tendencies (along with the complacency and laziness). Moving the fulcrum is a subversive activity. We will be undercutting the leverage of money and power by effectively rendering it powerless. Moving the fulcrum will require courage and collaboration because our lives will change, and we will need to inter-depend on each other.
Moving the fulcrum will require a willingness to bend and break the rules of late-stage capitalism, a willingness to participate in subversive activities like informal/barter economies and cooperatives. It will require subversive learning activities like study circles focused on, perhaps surprisingly, some of the great thinking that came out of the 1960s and 70s: Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Paulo Freire), Rules for Radicals (Saul Alinsky), and “education for freedom” (in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited). There is still a lot of untapped wisdom in Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda, in Erich Fromm’s Revolution of Hope, in Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality, and in Edward Herman’s/Noam Chomski’s Manufacturing Consent. In addition to these are the crucial, contemporary works of Rebecca Solnit and Naomi Klein, among others. All of these writers require that we read and educate ourselves. All of these writers underscore the importance of self-critical communities of practice. All of these writers require that we, collectively, provide for those who are by circumstance or design of the system “the least among us,” and that we provide for them out of the substance of who we are, because they are us.
In other words, it will be we ourselves who change, not anyone else. That realization is perhaps the most significant, and the most difficult, fulcrum shift of all, but it is something we, all of us, can do right now, every one of us, from where we are, with what we have.