Run Philosophy

May 20, 2022

Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts. Wendell Berry

Escapism is fun. I like to get away from work, loneliness, and the depressing news in the New York Times by reading books, watching movies, hiking, and enjoying two marijuana cookies on Saturday nights. But sometimes, as Martha and the Vandellas sang in 1965, there’s “nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide.”

Escapism is understandable and practical when it involves matters of survival. People fleeing war or extreme poverty or climate change are doing what I would do if I found myself in their shoes. And with the rise in totalitarianism around the world, more and more people are fleeing or will be fleeing dictatorships that restrict human rights and crush human freedoms.

Today I read an article in the always informative, often discouraging New York Times about young professionals in China who are investigating ways of escaping the oppressive restrictions of the Chinese Communist Party by emigrating to other parts of the world. They cannot research these possibilities openly on the internet, due to government censorship, so they’ve come up with a euphemism to use in their internet searches for emigration possibilities: “Run philosophy.” That code phrase enables them, for now anyway, to exchange tips and ideas for getting away from their increasingly Orwellian society and running toward the freedoms of the Western world.

But the freedoms that we’ve long taken for granted in this country are under a growing threat from an authoritarian wing of the Republican party, led and inspired by Donald Trump, with the strong support of right wing Catholics, evangelical Protestants, gun promoters, white nationalists, and anti-democratic opponents of free and fair elections. The U.S. Supreme Court, dominated by six conservative Catholics out of nine justices, is almost certainly going to overturn Roe vs Wade, thereby denying women the right to choose whether or not to have an abortion. The right to personal safety is increasingly endangered by the insane proliferation of guns and mass shootings that are aided and abetted by the gun cult and its lobbyists. I find it fascinating that so many of the anti-abortion people call themselves “pro-life,” but also support the death penalty and the proliferation of guns. Maybe that’s where “pro-life” comes from: prolife-ration of weapons.

From time to time I hear some liberals mutter that if Donald Trump or someone like him is elected or steals the election in 2024, they will move to Canada or Europe. But while such a fight-or-flight reaction is understandable, especially if the U.S. becomes a theocracy or just another country with a strongman rule, led in our case by an American Caesar, fleeing fascism would only be a temporary solution.

There is no escaping climate change. There is no escaping religious puritanism, political zealots, power-hungry Putinesque megalomaniacs. There is no escaping anger, fear, or human nature.

But maybe the poet Wendell Berry was on to something when he wrote: Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts. Maybe, rather than focusing on all the earth-shattering, negative world events, we would be wise to pay more attention to healing ourselves.

This morning I did my brief breathing and meditation exercise, and this time I asked my inner being (or God, if you prefer) what I might share with my readers about how to cope with the metastasizing madness of the human race. Here’s what I wrote down:

Love in the midst of chaos. Stay centered in times of turmoil. Steady as she goes. Be true to the real you, to Source, no matter what others do, no matter what’s going on in the world. Back to basics. Don’t be frightened by the passing show. Do what you need to do, then be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

Run philosophy? Not for me. I ain’t goin’ nowhere.