There are people for whom everything a Democrat does is treason, and for everything a Republican does is idiocy.  Instead of commenting on individual policies and actions, people look to party affiliation as a shortcut in determining political appropriateness.  Like any stereotype, this type of thinking hides more than it reveals, and does nothing to further the aims of good government.

In his 1796 farewell address, President George Washington called political parties the “worst enemy” of government.

Washington commented:  “[T]he common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.”

Washington had been caught in the middle of a war between Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans and Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists.  Forced to choose a side, Washington declared himself a Federalist, but in his final act as President he called for both sides to settle their disputes and put the interests of the republic to heart instead.

Mark Twain, as well, wrote harsh words on party loyalty.  He wrote:

Look at the tyranny of party — at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty — a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes — and which turns voters into chattles, slaves, rabbits, and all the while their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing their doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible texts and billies, and pocketing the insults and licking the shoes of his Southern master.

Twain’s point was that party politics was a way for people to control the minds of others with an us-versus-them mentality.  No matter if the party is corrupt, or duplicitous, or engages in activities that are harmful to democracy; the only thing that matters in party politics is that your party wins and the other one loses.

The dominance of the two-party system in the United States has led to a political framework where there is little alternative in public policy.  The two parties squabble over smaller, hot-button cultural issues such as abortion and the definition of marriage, while much more pressing and meaningful issues — health care, militant foreign policy, expanding federal power, climate change, energy policy — are given little attention.

For example, 72 percent of Americans — an impressive majority — favor a government administered health care plan to compete with private insurance, yet it is this very proposal that faces the most opposition in the halls of government.

The reason for this consensus is that powerful corporate interests have maintained a grip on positions of power for some time, and they strut arm-and-arm with the dominant political parties in ensuring their authority.  The whole notion of “Red” and “Blue” states is a simple divide-and-conquer strategy that splits the American public in order to prevent fundamental and democratic change.

The result is a type of “zombie politics”, where individual Americans unthinkingly fall in lock-step behind a political leader and party without considering the consequences of the policy.

There is no pretense of critical thinking, but simply unwavering uniformity:  a nation of zombies.

There should be no doubt that both political parties and their adherents are guilty of this zombie approach, but there is also little avoiding the truth that adherents to Republican Party ideology are particularly unmoored from genuine principle.  A party that once supported good ideas such as small government and a non-interventionist foreign policy has transformed into a party that waves the banner of religious bigotry, small-minded populism and the literal use of torture against anyone who disagrees with them.  This is the kernel of fascism, and the fact that even 10 or 20 percent of Americans go along with this is in many ways chilling.

Consider a world without the chains of political party, where candidates simply ran on their individual position.   Without the backdrop of a party, candidates could propose novel or creative solutions without needing to worry about a larger party agenda.  More candidates could enter the field without needing to worry about “dominant” candidates supported by powerful parties.  And without the label of a political party, individual citizens would actually have to pay attention to the candidate and engage in critical thinking to determine if the policies make sense and are worthwhile.

For the last fifty years, corporate power, government, the empire, and the division between rich and poor have all increased dramatically — regardless of who has been in office.  Clinton expanded government, but so did George W. Bush.  Nixon bombed Vietnam, but it was Kennedy who got America involved.  George W. Bush lied to the public to start a war in Iraq, but Johnson did the same thing in the Gulf of Tonkin.

And this entire time, corporations have benefited at the expense of individual people.  This is the result of a dysfunctional two-party system and the dominance of zombie politics.

Enough is enough.  At some point Americans need to see the Democratic and Republican parties for what they are: two different handmaidens serving the same greedy power centers, the same corporate elite, the same ostentatious political circles.  And they can do this by dropping their allegiance to their political party, and affirming their allegiance to the Constitution and the republic itself.

Instead of enforcing one public policy for the entire country, a federal America would allow the several states to develop their own unique solutions to local problems while still guaranteeing the basic rights outlined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It would be these common freedoms that would unify Americans.  Meanwhile, the problems of the day could be debated, discussed, and eventually implemented at the state level.

This would implement the genuine will of the people and lead to democratic growth in a variety of ways:

• People in any given state, be it Kansas or California, would have forty nine other examples of how a state might address any given issue.   A clash of policy perspectives, like the clash of truths, would allow states to compare and contrast the different ways to solve a problem — and like convergence in nature, eventually they might come to the conclusion that any specific problem may only have one or two actual solutions.  So all Americans would be able to witness an organic sense of community problem solving that is now absent.

• People would be much closer to the actual mechanisms of power. Sacramento or Albany, as unglamorous as such places might be, are nonetheless much easier to contact and get to than Washington D.C.   And if power were decentralized even further down to cities and counties, people might only have to go a short distance to meet with a local council member to really affect the quality of their lives.  Contrast this with the situation today, where the average citizen knows nothing about their state or local government, because such entities have relatively little power to do anything substantive.

• Taxes could be considerably lowered. The current tax system takes money from the states and redistributes it to further federal agendas in education, energy, agriculture, the military, and other Congressional pet and pork projects.  By devolving power back to the states, the federal government would give responsibility back to the states to take care of these problems, obviating the need for tax money.

• Perhaps the most important effect of a genuinely federal America would be an increase in freedom. Freedom means responsibility, and by making states take care of their problems, be it health care or homelessness, real power would be placed in the hands of everyday citizens to tackle these problems.  In other words, the social ills of the day would no longer be someone else’s problem — they would be our problem, and it would be up to us to fix them.  This is a scary concept for a lot of people and one of the primary reasons why many individuals are scared of local power.  They are scared that one day they might have the power to actually do something.  For many people, it is easier to be helpless than to be free.

The more that government does, the less the citizens feel obligated to do.  And so citizens sop caring about anything other than their own individual (and often petty) desires.

It bears repeating than in a federal America, the federal government would still play a pivotal role in defending basic rights for all Americans.   And in fact, the federal government would do a much better job at doing just that instead of attempting to impose a common policy over fifty very different states and thousands of local communities.  The executive and the federal judiciary could concern themselves with enforcing the Bill of Rights while Congress would not have to meet as often and write so many new laws.

To make this more concrete, consider the issue of the legalization of drugs.  Currently, the federal government imposes one blanket policy over the entire country, when in fact it ought to be the right of the states, and communities within those states, to implement their own policies with regard to drug use, including for medicinal purposes.  Same with the issues of assisted suicide, the drinking age, and even climate change and health care.  But what would never change would be the federal government’s role in, for example, keeping all speech free, or in ensuring the rights of the accused are protected, or enforcing the writ of habeas corpus:  liberties and protections that are explicitly mentioned in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights but which are rather precariously situated at the moment.

This is not some utopian ideal.  Rather, this is the way the American Constitution is supposed to function.  Federal power was always intended to remain limited and restrained in favor of state and local regulation.  The Tenth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights, explains quite clearly that, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people.”   A federal America is enshrined by the law of the land, and is not some political fantasy.

For real democracy to sprout in America, there is no need for any new laws.   The Constitution, in its current form, is a great guarantee of rights and liberty.

What needs rethinking is the balance of power between states and the federal government.   Americans should consider the harsh fact that the federal government is far larger today than it was ever intended to be, and that government, at heart, is only legitimate to the extent it expresses the will of the governed.  Americans have extraordinary powers as citizens to make changes to the country.  But for any change to happen — real, meaningful change, not the fake “change” peddled by politicians — it will require that citizens look to each other, instead of the government, in implementing creative solutions to problems.  This is an empowering thought, and all it requires is adherence to the federal structure as outlined by the Constitution.

Even the most cursory glance at history reveals that societies established on high principles, over time, degenerate and falter.  Liberte, egalite, fraternite paved the road to Napoleon; the stirring Jeffersonian sentiment that “all men are created equal” has produced a modern America whose penchant for empire and dominion is no different than that of the British or Romans before them.

We forget — at our peril — that even a perfect law is meaningless to a lawbreaker.  Good laws are only part of what go into making a good society.  A good society also requires a decent and virtuous citizenry that will respect each other and obey just laws.

A law that commands that people respect each other will be useless if those people do not wish to respect each other.

In America today, if people wanted a just society without sexism and racism, without poverty and prisons, without the military industrial complex and its attendant economic principles, they could have it.  The American Constitution, in its current form, protects individual liberty, demands the end of racism and the equal protection of the law.  It protects free speech and the rights of the people against a tyrannical central government.  No new laws are required if people wished to implement a more just governing structure in their society.

But what is required — and what remains the most critical issue in defending the last remnants of a dying republic — is a real revolution amongst every individual citizen herself.  Every person, internally — in her heart and in her head — must look at her own life and her own relationship to her society and her government and seek a different way.

A person who wishes respect to govern at the international level must implement respect at her own individual level.  A person who wants freedom must find and institute such freedom in her own life. A person who wants an end to racism and sexism must tackle those social demons within her own mind and rid them to the best of her ability.  She must change first — because it is abundantly clear that her society and her government will not seek such change by themselves.

For too long Americans have been caught in the co-dependent myth that someone will come and save them.  It was this rush for a savior that led to such widespread support for President Obama, who has not proved himself worthy of any mantle of “change”.

There is no knight-in-shining-armor who will wisk away the decadent corporations or the entrenched elite who impoverish the country and bomb the people of other nations.

A people receive the government they deserve.  The debacle of Hurricane Katrina, the sorrow and tragedy of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the slow but steady collapse of internal democracy, the destruction of the environment — the American public has already borne witness to several alarm bells concerning the true state of their society.  If nothing is done, it is because the people themselves do not care for the state of their liberty or the tyranny enacted by their leaders. T he people themselves have lost sight of the democratic values enshrined in their Constitution.

Yet it is eminently possible to return to these principles and return to democracy.  But for this to happen, it requires a change in every individual citizen to rededicate herself to a different way of life.

What this way of life will look like is  unclear, and that is part of the problem — every student of democracy is, at this moment, engaged in a subtle experimentation with the future.

But we also know what would not be included in the future world: racism, sexism, poverty, prisons, religious intolerance, militarism, ignorance. These are the demons that must be vanquished individually — and, truth be told, they will be vanquished socially as well.  This is guaranteed.

There have been enough excuses and enough delusions.  The real democratic revolution can begin right now within the minds and hearts of anyone willing to accept that challenge.  This is the only path to democracy.

In every person, every object, every experience, there are things that can be approved of, and things that can be disapproved of.  But there is nothing in this universe that any human can say is exclusively good, or exclusively bad.

A man finds his perfect woman, yet he will still quarrel with her or find some trait lacking; a jobseeker obtains her dream job, yet there are still faults with the way the organization is run; a traveler encounters a place with absolute serenity, yet he will still experience pain and discomfort.

The good must exist with the bad — they are two sides of the same coin.  We would not know good if we did not know bad.  Yin cannot exist without Yang, Christ cannot exist without Satan, the day cannot exist without night.

In all things in life, we must see the good and the bad. There is no such thing as the perfect parent, the perfect lover, the perfect child. All people contain flaws; no experience can match the ideal.

When we understand that all human perceptions contain both good and bad, then we begin to see what is — to see how something truly exists in all of its complete glory.  And there is beauty in that, because when we recognize what is, we look directly at the truth.

When we see what is, we spare ourselves the misery of disappointment.  Disappointment comes about when we cling to an idea about something or someone which isn’t true.  It is then inevitable that we will be disappointed.  I believe the sun is not hot, that it cannot hurt me, so I stare at it — I am setting myself up for disappointment when I discover that by staring at the sun I have destroyed my eyesight.  I believe that I can jump off a cliff and will sprout wings — I will be disappointed when I fall to my death.  These are extreme examples.  Much more common are the views that we oftentimes hold about people, relationships, objects, life itself, that just don’t adhere to reality.  Then, we are inevitably disappointed.

Disappointment is bad enough, but what is worse is that it also leads to blame.  Blame is the great evil of human existence, and in its wake are a multitude of demons.  Blame says, “I am the victim, I am totally correct and totally helpless and I don’t deserve this, I really deserve that and I am going to be miserable until I get it.”  Blame is what happens when a person clings to the fantasy that his or her false perception is the way the world should work.  It is the masked person clinging to the mask and the darkness it brings instead of welcoming the daylight.

Blame is a great evil because when someone is blamed, that person will then go and blame someone else.  It creates an endless cycle of victimhood. This is why the planet is about to be destroyed from environmental misuse and the nations of the earth stare at each other through the eye-pieces of nuclear weapons — it is always somebody elses’s fault.

No one is perfect, nor are any two person’s perceptions of things the same.  In the end, that is OK.  It is OK that people see things differently.  Life goes on, and people will make do.  In spite of all the greed, destruction and war that humans have inflicted upon each other, there is still love, dignity, and justice.  There is still a sense compassion that resides within the hearts of the noble. That can never be wiped out, no matter the pesticides that are thrown on the spirits of the strong.  These things can always be cultivated — but only if people want to cultivate them.

Indeed, despite the differing perceptions that exist amongst people, perhaps the most amazing thing is that some consensus can be discovered about good and bad.  A person knows good in the same way that he will know water when he drinks it, or love when he feels it.  All humans possess some sense organ that measures good and bad.  The real problem is that we choose to see one, but never the other; that we refuse to integrate both good and bad into one holistic observation — what is.

Every night, we retire and then a new day begins thereafter.  It is enough to have survived.  Our journey through this maze might be aided by the clarity of sight that comes with real vision — simply looking at what is, and never expecting more than that.  The idea “what should be” is one that bears great responsibility for so much unhappiness and tragedy, tragedy that will produce days, months, years and even decades of unnecessary pain and anguish.

If a society lacks such characteristics in its relationships, then it will unquestionably lack freedom at a social level as well.

It is a sad reality, then, that the vast majority of societies on this Earth and the vast majority of individual interactions are not marked by freedom.  Rather, they are marked by a need for domination and control.  This is the tragic dyad of the master-servant relationship.

The master-servant relationship is the default form of interaction for most people on the planet today.  In dealing with others, a person acts either as a master or as a servant, as dominator or dominated, as ruler or ruled.  The husband oversees his wife; the employer commands the employed; the bully abuses those lacking in confidence.  In each situation, a person falls into this default pattern where they act as the oppressing master or as the groveling servant.

At a global level, this relationship unquestionably dominates as well.  The billions of poor people who live on this planet — oppressed, dark-skinned, condemned to poverty — must suffer the indignities of helplessness and war.  Meanwhile, their masters — the global rich, the powerful, the light-skinned, the colonizers — spend their days and nights enjoying themselves and their privileges.  The globalization of poverty means that the rich American no longer has to worry about the slaves who toil for her benefit, because there is a rare chance she will ever encounter them.  The child labor in China, the call-center in India, the serfdom in central America (and central California) can be summarily dismissed and ignored.

The ugliness of history is easily explained through the lens of the master-servant relationship.  Every war that has been ever fought, all the blood that has been shed over territory or for an idea or for some religion has been based on one side’s need to feel superior — to be the master and to have a servant.  Thus, the German people went on a rampage and occupied Europe in the 1940s because they believed they were genetically superior to their neighbors on the continent.  The state of Israel kills and oppresses the Palestinian people because it believes that its claims to the land are superior to the claims of the people who currently live there.  America has invaded Iraq because it believes (among other things) that it can impart its superior values to a misguided and backwards society while also showing the world that it remains master of the planet.  One nation insists that it is superior, and to prove this it must treat another nation like a diseased dog, beating it up and torturing it so that others will see who is master over whom.

If a person understands the nature of the master-servant relationship, she will understand everything from international politics to her own personal relationships.  All human interaction is colored by this relationship; we are all born into it, and we are all silently trapped by it.  Instead of seeking mutual understanding, people seek only to solidify their own perspectives, to be proven “right” — this will make them a master.  My politician is better than your politician, my god is better than your god, my religion more correct than your religion, my ideas and beliefs better than your ideas and beliefs.  There is only victim and aggressor, saint and sinner, angel and devil, a crude and never-ending battle for individual supremacy where we can all feel smug about being so much better than everybody else.

The tragic effect of the master-servant relationship is to deprive the world of freedom.  Those who must serve are in an obvious condition of slavery; but the chain that attaches to the slave also connects to the throat of her oppressor.  Here is a truth that most would ignore:  whatever the supposed benefits of being a master, it is a state that is also deeply servile and oppressive to the human spirit.   A master becomes dependent on his servant, but also becomes enslaved to the fear that one day he may no longer be a master.

If a person wants her liberty, then she must learn to reject the master-servant relationship and repudiate this division of the world into the superior and the inferior.  This is an difficult thing to do.  All people are trained to think in terms of master and servant; they have come to automatically behave in ways which reinforce its existence.  We see a tank, or a gun, or someone with money and wealth and privilege, and we immediately think that they are better than us or more superior.  Or, by contrast, we see dark-skin, or poverty, or manual labor, or a different belief system, and we see things that are worse than scum.

Why do the police officer, the politician, the rich man think they are better than others? Because they are told so?  No! Because they see how others treat them, how people rush to lick their boots and kneel before them and pledge allegiance in some revolting display of fealty that any defender of liberty would instinctively abhor.

The master remains master because the servant is eager to perform her servitude.

A free individual is neither master nor servant. She obeys no one but herself, and follows no laws but those of her own making.  She bows to no police force or military. She forces no one to do anything, but she is not forced to do anything either.  No one can do anything to her without her consent.  Such a person cannot be controlled by any government.  She is more powerful than any government.

Such freedom cannot be bestowed or granted by anyone else.  A person who has been a slave all her life knows nothing but the habits of slavery; having never fought for her liberty herself, she cannot understand what it means to be free.  If she is liberated by another, she will come to serve her liberator.

Freedom must be won, piece by piece and inch by inch.  It is not a boon given by the gods; it is a treasure that is only reached through individual struggle, torn from the mouth of the angry lion and defended against at every moment, for in this world of hate, anger and sorrow a relapse into the habit of servitude is painfully easy.

A person who wants her liberty must insist on her dignity, on her equality, on her right to happiness.  She must not cower before the manifestations of the tyrant that materialize in her fellow man; she must stand her ground and meet the force of oppression with the force of freedom.  She must understand that there will be no one who will come and rescue her or remove the shackles from her feet — and that those who claim to do so are charlatans who pose as liberators but are just another set of oppressors.

She must learn to free herself.

Once a servant is enlightened on the meanness of her condition and the extent of her slavery, it becomes her decision to accept or to reject it, to attain her freedom or remain a servant.  There are many who would prefer the safety of their servitude over the chaos and unknowingness of liberty; let them choose their servility.  For there are also those who, upon seeing their chains, will allow their shackles to fall and enter the undiscovered country of chaotic liberation.

Anyone who says that freedom is easy has not truly endeavored to obtain it.  To be a free man or woman on this Earth is the most difficult thing a person can do.  But there is no other condition as infinitely rewarding or as profound in its majesty.  Freedom can yet be brought to humanity, but it will have to be won person by person, individual struggle by individual struggle, through the rejection of both servility and superiority in favor of the humbling equality of individual dignity and respect for all.  This is the true price of liberty: the end of masters and servants.

This slavery is better appreciated when we deconstruct it. First, modern consumer life enslaves the labor of individuals, tying everyone to a model of social organization that seeks to extract natural resources from the earth and convert them into consumer products. Thus, every morning, millions upon millions of people wake up, commute to work on overcrowded transportation systems so that they can go to an office building where they sit and work with other people, many of them relative strangers, using their brains to accomplish a task that was given to them by a higher up.

Going to work is represented as a choice: since there is no taskmaster or man with a whip forcing people to do things, there is a facade that no one is forced to do anything. But coercion is inherent, because if you don’t go to work, you can’t earn a wage, and without a wage it is impossible to secure the basic necessities of life (food, water, shelter). There is no opt-out provision, no way to exit the long hours of work and go somewhere else where people might choose to live as they please.

This constriction of human potential leads to misery. How many people today fear the ringing of their alarm at some ungodly hour, awakening them to yet another day of some mind-numbing task which bears no relation to their own true wants and desires! How common is the desire to find the “perfect job,” even when such a job cannot exist — for all jobs are tied to the machinery of consumption and possession. Over time, there is an existential sense of boredom, discontent and loneliness attached to everyday life, which becomes compounded with the realization that there is no end in sight.

In response to these feelings, people enslave their minds to various coping strategies that help them get through the day. Living out one’s life in an 8 x 10 cubicle is not natural; the boredom and suffering attached to the workday, like any other pain, is a warning signal given by the brain, telling its occupant that things are not right. Some individuals take psychoactive drugs like antidepressants or alcohol as a way of getting through the day, while others cling to fundamentalist beliefs that help interpret a world without meaning. But perhaps the most widespread coping strategy is a simple conformance to consumer life, and it is here that we witness the true genius of the consumer model.  Even as it creates the social conditions that produce feelings of stress, anxiety, and loneliness, it also suggests that the answer is to literally buy into the system, to seek some purpose in the unfettered acquisition of consumer items.  Find fulfillment through shopping, it says; meanwhile, ignore the lack of choice and genuine human connectivity in your life.  Dismiss the importance of family, friends, and free time, of your precious liberty and freedom, because you have money to earn and things to purchase.

The enslavement of labor and mind results in a third form of bondage: the enslavement of the spirit.  The direction of human labor towards resource extraction and consumption, and the use of the psychological energy in justifying a life spent on continual consumer acquisition, leaves little time to spend with oneself or with others.  This is perhaps the most tragic aspect of modern life: as animals endowed with tremendous amounts of imagination and also a deep capacity to create and cultivate interpersonal connections, it is in our nature to want to relax, do nothing, to sit around and converse with others, and yet these are the activities that we have the least amount of time to do.  Over time, and through years of indoctrination through the school system, people become culturally programmed to forget that life can be much more than what TV says.

Yet even in the midst of this oppression and slavery there is still the potential for genuine freedom and human expression.  No amount of material wealth can hide the deep ache for liberty that resides in every person’s heart.  A better way of life is possible, but to get there requires a thorough examination of modern society.  It requires that every individual who finds herself asking if the Tower of Babel that has been constructed on the foundation of so much misery, toil, and oppression is inevitable — or whether there is a path back to Zion.  Unlike any other form of slavery, the chains of consumerism can be dispensed with whenever a person decides for herself that it simply isn’t worth it anymore.  Freedom, in other words, is a choice — and the more people who realize that life can change for the better, at any moment, the more hope there is for the unleashing of the dormant potential of the human race.

Two of Kubrick’s earlier works — Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) are openly critical and downright subversive of American cultural habits. In Dr. Strangelove, the insane General Jack Ripper decides that he wants to start nuclear war with the Russians and orders bomber planes to attack the USSR. The film switches between General Ripper’s offices, the War Room in the White House (where the President and his generals are attempting to gain control over the situation), and a lone fighter bomber that has lost its communications systems. Kubrick is unabashed in his depictions of American bravado and nuclear weapons — the President (played by Peter Sellers) can barely keep control over his trigger-happy generals; meanwhile, General Ripper has clearly lost his mind, explaining to a British exchange officer Captain Lionel Mandrake (also played by Sellers) about the need to keep his “bodily fluids” pure from the communist threat.

But the critiques presented by Strangelove go deeper than these depictions of a gung-ho attitude towards war. The presence of Dr. Strangelove, a German scientist who used to work for the Nazis (and also played by Sellers), is key towards understanding Kubrick’s deeper point. Towards the end of the movie, Strangelove’s behavior turns bizarre and openly totalitarian, and he starts shouting in German for victory and raising the Nazi salute. His presence in the film seems to make the point that Americans are not primed for aggression but are simply naive when it comes to military might, easily led by charismatic figures (such as Dr. Strangelove) who are more subtle in their intrigue and loyal only to their own to their own investigations and wants. The fatal American cultural flaw that presents itself is nothing sinister, but simply a willingness to unthinkingly sacrifice oneself to causes that just aren’t that worthy. This is best shown in the last few minutes of the movie, when the captain of the lone bomber seems to go to extra lengths to ensure that his mission is completed, even when the viewer knows that the consequences will at that point be disastrous.

This is an extraordinarily relevant message for today’s world, especially within the context of the Iraq War. The war itself was sold to a compliant public that unquestionably fell into lock-step behind President Bush and his theories of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It is amazing that in a country that values individuality as much as America, people are so quick to follow the orders of authority figures. And now that so much has been sacrificed, it becomes harder to admit that going to war was wrong, and that the war needs to end.

Lolita is a film that is as subversive as Dr. Strangelove but geared towards an examination of American attitudes of sex and suburbia. Based on the famous novel by Vladimir Nabokov (Nabokov also wrote the screenplay for this film, changing the story in various ways), Kubrick creates a staid and vanilla world of American suburban live that barely contains a pulsing and deviant sexual energy. In almost every scene, seemingly innocent everyday interactions between typical suburbanites — a school dance, someone checking into a hotel, a conversation between two strangers — are thickly layered with innuendo and crackle with the hint that something else is going on.

Kubrick uses the eyes of a foreigner, Professor Humbert Humbert, as a means of showcasing the existence of this explosive and forbidden sexuality. Professor Humbert is a boarder at the house of Charlotte Hayes, and while living there becomes instantly attracted to her 14-year-old daughter Lolita. Humbert, played by James Mason, is creepy and loathsome, and his lust for Lolita is not depicted favorably in any sense.

Yet the message of the film isn’t a simple morality tale. Early in the movie, the viewer is introduced to Clare Quilty (played by Peter Sellers), who seems to be as deviant in his sexual mores as Humbert. But unlike Humbert, Quilty is charming and has an easy manner, and these attributes grant him easy access to a hidden sexual world where infidelity, group sex and homosexuality are all hinted at — perhaps not scandalous today, but certainly out of the question for an earlier time.

What exactly is going on? The film takes place in an America that is beginning to flee to the suburbs, and Kubrick and Nabokov are challenging their audiences to question why people want to escape to their own private enclaves outside of the cities. What lies behind the desire for the suburban man to take his family out of the city where he can have his own castle and keep his wife and kids under lock and key? Culturally we believe that suburbia is a white-picket fence and two dogs running outside, but Kubrick suggests that there is something a lot dirtier being repressed and hidden. The idea that we can be happy having one sexual partner and raising kids for our entire lives is a costly illusion that produces tremendous harms — it is in suburbia, after all, that Humbert gets his chance to pursue Lolita, something that might not have been possible in a community with stronger human ties. The viewer dislikes Humbert, but ignores the fact that Humbert just wants in on the big secret that everyone else, especially Quilty, seems to be enjoying.

Kubrick reveals his most philosophical understandings of the direction of American society in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The story revolves around the discovery of various black monoliths at various points in time. 2001 is a long movie and it delves into many issues, but what is most relevant for this discussion is Kubrick’s depiction of a world 30 years from his. It is a world of unprecedented technology — colonization of the moon, a fully functional space station with commuter access from the Earth, video phones — yet there is little genuine human connection. In two scenes, we see scientists have conversations or view messages from loved ones — Dr. Heywood Floyd with his daughter and Dr. Frank Poole with his parents — yet the images are cold and without any sense of love. HAL, the famous computer, acts as human as the actual flesh-and-blood humans themselves, perhaps not an indication of his humanity as much as an observation of the machine-like way in which people appear to be interacting with each other. Despite great technological innovation, the basic problems of human loneliness and the need for love are still unaddressed.

There is also a powerful social commentary as well. The world of 2001 is a place where every aspect of society is managed from above. There is no presence of the common man — in fact, the film centers around elites who are intent in keeping secret the potential power of the monolith from other humans. Mark Miller writes:

“If it were re-released today, 2001 would be diminished by the multiplex not just because of the smaller screen and poor acoustics, but because the very setting would implicitly subvert the film’s subversive vision. Even if it were brought back to some quaint old movie palace, however, 2001 still could not exert its original satiric impact because the mediated ‘future’ it envisions is now ‘our’ present, and therefore unremarkable: a development not merely architectural but ideological. The world of Doctor Floyd (like the new dorm, mall or hospital) is a world absolutely managed — the force controlling it discreetly advertised by the US flag with which the scientist often shares the frame throughout his ‘excellent speech’ at Clavius and also by the corporate logos — ‘Hilton’, ‘Howard Johnson’, ‘Bell’ — that appear throughout the space station. In 1968, the prospect of such total management seemed sinister — a patent circumvention of democracy. Today, within the ever-growing ‘private’ sphere the movie adumbrates, that ‘prospect’ seems completely natural.”

It is, in fact, the world of today. As Miller notes, this film was released just as the student protest movement of the 1960s was reaching its fever pitch, in America and throughout the world. The audience who would have gone to see this movie — college educated young people — were the same people who at the time would have been challenging the status quo. Kubrick’s depiction of the future, a place where corporations and government work hand-in-hand to govern and control, would have been upsetting. Sadly, it was a prescient vision.

Finally, it is worth talking about Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), perhaps his least understood work. The film centers around Dr. Bill Harford (played by Tom Cruise), his relationship with his wife Alice (played by Nicole Kidman), and his fantastical sexual experiences one night out in New York. At the beginning of the film, Dr. Harford and Alice are at an extragavant Christmas party, and both find themselves flirting with other people. Dr. Harford meets two models who wish to take him “to the end of the rainbow,” while Alice talks to a charismatic and older Hungarian gentleman. Bill and Alice come back home, and after having sex Alice confides to Bill about a fantasy she had about a naval officer while on vacation with Bill. She asks him if he has had similar fantasies, and he says that he has never had any stray thoughts. She gets angry with him and calls him a hypocrite. Their reverie is interrupted by a phone call made to Dr. Harford, and at this point he begins his journey through various sexual depravaties that the film is famous for (including the sex party outside the city).

Eyes Wide Shut is accused of being cold, meandering, and confusing, judgments of the film that are accurate to some degree. The viewer never connects with any of the characters — Alice Harford is frosty and moody, and it is impossible to make rhyme or reason of Bill’s adventures. Bill seems to be searching for some sort of release throughout the entire film, and at the end it is unclear whether his experiences out in New York were real or simply a product of his own imagination.

The film itself is based on a short novel written by a psychiatrist named Arthur Schnitzler, who is said to have anticipated many of Freud’s ideas about sexuality. This background helps reveal that the film should be best understood as a psychological examination of the modern American psyche. The movie strongly echoes Lolita in addressing sexual desire and lust within American culture, but its themes are different, simply because the America of the late 1990s (and of Eyes Wide Shut) is a different place than the America of the early 1960s. If Lolita sought to question the panic in finding security and safety in the suburbs, Eyes Wide Shut asks the viewer to question our modern culture of constant sexual stimulation and commercialization. After the argument with his wife, Dr. Harford witnesses an orgy, encounters a woman who he has never met yet who claims to love him, and sees a teenage girl being pimped by her father, among other things. These experiences represent basic archetypes of many sexual fantasies that permeate modern American culture — a man sleeping with more than one woman, the “love at first sight”/”finding one’s true soulmate” message that pervades most modern romantic stories, and the emphasis on young sexuality made famous by such acts as Britney Spears and the Olsen twins. Yet despite encountering what should be very fulfilling fantasies, Dr. Harford never finds any release, nor is there any lesson learned. In a culture that is inundated with sexual images and messages, is it even possible to have a sexual desire or thought that is not colored by pornographic consumerism? Is a true sense of sexuality even possible?

And there is the larger social critique as well. Dr. Harford belongs to the elite, to the monied class of Americans that can throw lavish Christmas parties and who have the means to host orgies with beautiful models out in the suburbs. His only genuine human connection is to his wife, but this is severed when she candidly admits to an extramarital fantasy. It is at this moment that his world is shattered and when he begins his dark sexual journey. Why should that moment affect him so? It is because he had sought refuge in his own little world where his career and money afforded him a small sense of security. Yet this security was always false — his wife was probably always distant and even a little cruel, and his colleagues had almost certainly been buying affection from plastic women for a long time. His eyes were always open, but he chose never to see the truth — they were “wide shut,” in other words.

Modern America is a place where escapsim into fantasy is almost a televised sport, a place where consumerism uses sex as a way to sell products and provide cheap pleasures, but ones that are ultimately fleeting and unfulfilling. It is not just Dr. Harford’s eyes that are shut — an entire culture seems to have just tuned itself out, letting those with powerful interests control it by manipulating base desires in ways that will provide a profit.

Kubrick knew that Eyes Wide Shut would cause a lot of controversy because of the sexual images — some parts of the the movie were famously censored in America — and he also knew that the average consumer would walk in knowing little more about the movie other than it had a lot of sex. And in fact, the average viewer walks away almost completely unsatisfied. It is likely that Kubrick meant the entire process of making the film, from the shooting to the marketing and hype surrounding it, to act as a subversive statement against the programming of sexualized consumerism. He asks: Why are you paying $10 to watch this movie? What are you expecting to get out of it? Why are you disappointed?

At a time when ignoring what’s going on in the world is leading to horrific consequences — politically, economically, socially, and environmentally — Kubrick’s films become more relevant than ever. They prompt much needed cultural self-examination, and can help Americans better understand their own place in the world, individually and as a nation and a culture.

Art can help understand the nature of the relationship.  Take The Lovers, for example, a piece by the artist Rene Magritte:

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Two people, a man and a woman, are kissing each other. They are presumably in love or at least in some type of sexual contact, yet there are two shrouds covering each person’s face.

The painting strikes the viewer as ridiculous — why, after all, would two people in love with each other want to cover their faces when they are kissing?

But isn’t this what people do all the time?  Isn’t the case that we are all guilty of placing some type of mask or shroud over our true selves in order to hide ourselves from the other? In modern relationships, even in sexual relationships, each party comes to the table masking his or her true self.  Relationships are seen as a long and draining bargaining process where the needs of the other party are constantly ignored or belittled.

Neither party is prepared to make the necessary sacrifices that must go into nurturing a healthy relationship; on the contrary, the parties involved seek to extract as much as possible from the other side.

The shrouds wrapped around the faces capture the fact that even in intimate contexts, we choose to remain separate from others.  Where there is separation and division, there can never be genuine love.

This is why so many marriages end in divorce, and why people get tired of their friendships and marriages over time.  They become tired of the masks they have chosen to wear.  They were never their true selves; and as a result, they reach a point where the pretense becomes too costly to be worth it.

What a horrible thing — the idea that we must shroud our individuality in order to find friendship or sexual relationships.  But this is considered normal.

This piece, by Pablo Picasso, entitled Girl Before a Mirror provides a compelling analysis of our own relationships to ourselves:

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The viewer sees a girl looking into a mirror, but her reflection is totally different — the girl is vibrant and young, but the person in the mirror dark and old. The blonde yellow hair and pale face contrast sharply with the dark purple, pink, and black of the woman in the mirror, who appears to be shrouded and hooded.

Through these colors, Picasso articulates the point that all people, if they care to look deep enough, have aspects of their personalities that they would otherwise choose not to look at. Just as this young girl confronts a dark picture of herself in the mirror, so do all people have a “shadow” that they repress.

Every person believes they are a wonderful, just, and good person.  Every person has constructed a wonderful picture of their personality that makes them always right.  This is natural, and probably helps keep people sane.  Yet this picture of perfection is in tension with reality — the fact that, eventually, a person may entertain certain dark thoughts that don’t comport with this fantastical picture of absolute goodness.  These dark thoughts are buried and repressed — the “shadow” of every person.

Carl Jung wrote of the shadow, “Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”

He noted, “How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious?”

While it suits most of us to believe that we are all god-fearing people who would only do good things and never harm anyone, the fact of the matter is that every person is capable of dark thoughts, not-so-good deeds, and even unspeakable atrocities if put in the appropriate circumstances.  This is an undeniable fact that is constantly ignored.  It is ignored because it is an ugly, but very real truth.

Those people on this world who are the harshest judges, the most vocal critics of those who have made mistakes, the most in favor of draconian laws and punishments — these are the people who have repressed their shadows to dark inner places, and who remain constantly afraid that their shadows may one day emerge.  They are hypocrites who fear to be exposed, for every person makes mistakes.  Every person deserves a second chance.  Those people who insist on human perfection, who would chase witches to the stake — these are the people who are in deep need of self-examination and therapy.

An honest relationship with one’s self means confronting the shadow and recognizing one’s failings as an inherently imperfect being, as an entity that could never possibly adhere to every law or social norm provided by society.  Instead of denying the shadow, the shadow must be integrated and accepted, and even loved.  Only by embracing the shadow can a person begin to completely love himself in all of his beautiful aspects.  Where there is separation and division, there can never be genuine love.

The impacts of a repressed shadow were noted in another Picasso painting called The Charnel House, painted in 1945:

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The Charnel House was being painted just as footage of the Holocaust was reaching civilians.  It is a bleak painting.

One can see figures in the painting — a dead family lying near or underneath a table.  There is a pitcher and plate of some sort on the table, but they are barely sketched out or attended to, perhaps intentionally forgotten as a way of underscoring the way everyday life becomes out-of-place within the context of total war.  The stark whites, blacks, and grays used by Picasso mimic the black-and-white news footage of starving and mutilated bodies found in concentration camps and battlefields. The jumbled heap of body parts (the viewer can make out feet, bellies, mouths, eyes, and hands) are arranged in a pyramid structure that resembles another famous work by Picasso, Guernica. Two hands, especially, seem to reach up to the heavens in one last futile gesture.

The world of The Charnel House is a world of horror and death, and in that sense it resembles the themes of Girl Before a Mirror. Girl Before a Mirror is the personal conflict that few of us choose to address, the illusions we construct so as to live in a pleasant fantasy world where we are good, decent people, without capacity for harm or error:  a fundamentally false world.

The Charnel House is the consequence of that repression.  By never confronting the shadow, a person erroneously concludes that they are good, and always good; and their enemies are wrong and evil, and always wrong and evil.  The world is divided into black and white, us versus them, right and wrong.  In turn, this leads to atrocities of unspeakable horror, all committed in the name of “good.”  Do you think the Crusades were waged in the name of evil?  Do you think that Hitler believed he was wrong?  Do you believe that Truman thought it was a bad idea to drop atomic weapons on Japanese cities?  The inevitable consequences of a repressed shadow.

People often wonder what it would take for peace to come to the Earth.  Peace is a journey which begins at the individual level, at the level of the relationship.  When individual relationships are at peace, then the world will be at peace.  Do you see this?  There is no need for a world government or new laws or any other structure or organization to achieve peace — peace is the natural outcome of a planet where every individual has taken the time to know herself and to end the individual struggles she might have both internally and with other people.

This is why achieving peace is so difficult: it begins with each of us.  Rare is the person who correctly understands that the crusade for peace and justice must begin in one’s own mind, with one’s own flaws and with one’s own personal demons.  This is where real peace begins.  It is the last place most people want to look.

This is not a riddle, but an observation based on the fact that human beings are too often creatures of habit.  Too often, a person handles the challenges of life in only a limited number of ways and will use these same old solutions time after time.

Thus, the future becomes the past because behavior is always the same.  And when behavior is the same, then the outcomes remain the same as well.  The pain and suffering of past wounds reoccur with an exactness that speaks not towards any cruel God or destiny, but rather to the reality of cause and effect:  do something a certain way, and a certain outcome is bound to happen.

In Eastern thought, the link between the past and the future is known as karma.  This word is not really translatable into English, but it has come to be associated in the West with an outside force which punishes bad actions and rewards good ones.

But this is not really what karma means.  Rather, karma is an idea that the outcome to any endeavor in life is determined by the initial seed of action.  The way a person approaches a challenge, the perspective that is brought, the intention that one carries:  these are the seeds that, once planted, will produce either good or bad fruit.  The input determines the output; the battle will be won or lost before the first shot is ever fired.

Thus, the best predictor of someone’s future is their past.  A person who wakes up every morning without thought, without knowledge of his life, without an awareness into the motivations and intentions which guide his behavior — this person is condemned to a life of constant repetition.  He will have the same problems, the same frustrations, the same agonies over and over because his approach to life is always the same.  He will be continually planting the same seeds day in and day out, and reap nothing more but the same failed harvest.

Such a life is a life of real Hell.  Heaven and Hell are not physical destinations.  Heaven and Hell are states of mind.  A life without awareness is Hell because it is a life of frustration.  The same problems come up over and over, and the same tired old solutions are used to tackle the problem once more.

When you look around at the people in your life, both friends and acquaintances, you may start to see how people repeat their problems in ways that may seem silly to you.  Perhaps they are chasing after the same rotten type of people or worried about their same rotten job, or engaging in addictive behaviors in a variety of contexts.  When it comes to other people, it is easy to observe these patterns because we are their observer.  We are their witnesses.  And as witnesses, we can see things clearly and without any blinders.

Sometimes we become so good at witnessing others that we begin to issue harsh judgments.  The others we witness seem like idiots.  It seems so clear to us.  But therein lies a basic problem of life — we are remarkably good at witnessing other people, but we are no good at all at witnessing our own lives.

A wise man once said, “How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you don’t see the beam in your own eye? You hypocrite! First remove the beam from your own eye, and then you’ll see clearly enough to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”  There is real wisdom in this.  Unless we begin to witness our own lives, we will never escape the Hells which we create and which doom us to a life of constant repetition.  Only by witnessing can we break the cycle which equates the past and the future, the cycle of karma, and discover real freedom.

The Hell of the mind comes about because of our relationship with our memory.  Too often, we treat memory as a compass.  We think of the pleasures and pains we experienced in the past, and we want to distill out the pains and recreate the pleasures.  We engage in the same behaviors but think that if we are just a bit smarter, we can avoid the pains and recoup the pleasure.  Do you see this fallacy?  We plant the same old seed but think this time we can get a different type of tree.  This is how the past becomes the future, and why the future remains the past.

When we witness, when we are aware, we experience something much more beautiful.  With witnessing, we have a different attitude about memory.  We no longer use it as a compass towards some future gain, but rather as a way of analyzing and learning about cause and effect.  We think back to an old love, with whom we had pleasure and pain, both sunshine and poison.  The person without awareness, the person in Hell, who does not act as his own witness — this person wants to recreate that same love without the pain.  But this is not possible.  Pain and pleasure are brother and sister; pleasure is a result of pain, and vice versa.  This person condemns himself to this type of love over and over, perhaps recapturing that pleasure for just a moment but also that same pain once more.  Can you see why this is Hell?

The person with awareness, who is now acting as his own witness — this person thinks differently.  He says, “no, this love cannot be repeated; the pleasure I experienced came along with the pain, and they are inseparable; I cannot chase this pleasure without also accepting the pain as well.”  And instead of planting the same seed, this individual plants a new seed for something different, having learned the lessons of the past.  In such a manner, karma is avoided, the cycle is broken, and a new future is created.

So many times in life we are tortured by the same anxieties.  A certain trigger puts the mind in a downward spiral of worry that is neither justified nor rational but seems inevitable and necessary.  Over and over, the same triggers make us feel so helpless.  The person who is witnessing, however, comes to see these triggers and can prevent the spiral of anxiety from ever taking place.  This is the power of witnessing.  Nothing in life is inevitable, nothing in life is set in stone.

Through witnessing, we come to access power — a real creative power which is the hallmark of freedom.  It is freedom because a person who witnesses has the power of infinity at her disposal.  For the person without awareness, who does not want to witness her life, who repeats the past over and over, the future is nothing more than a mirror or a carbon copy of the past; the details may change, but the underlying patterns, the archetypes of behavior, all of these things remain the same.  On the other hand, for the person who is witnessing life, the future is no longer a prison but becomes a blank slate.  And on this slate, the person who is witnessing can utilize intention to make anything, absolutely anything, manifest into reality. The future becomes a state of infinite possibility and not merely the stage for further misery.

In this existence, the most holy act each one of us can do on this Earth is to celebrate the witnessing of our lives, and to celebrate the sensations which we feel and the mind which acts as host to them.  We are all part of this Creation, and when we witness, it is Creation itself that is also witnessing.  Do you see how holy this is, the idea that the Universe, through us, comes to learn about itself?  The evolution and flowering of our individual minds does not take place in a vacuum — it takes place amidst the backdrop of universal sentience which both acts as teacher and as pupil, as both destiny and outcome.  When we learn, when we grow, when we witness, we do it not only for ourselves, but for all of Creation as well, for the entire fabric of sentience.  This is the responsibility of life and the joy and glory of existence itself.  This is what it means to find Heaven, and Nirvana, and Moksha and to break the cycle of karma.  These are the flowers and the fragrance which come from the seeds of witnessing.