Feudalism of the Soul

You will never escape yourself.

I could write a long story about my unavailable father, how he did about three things with me as a kid and those only after knock-down drag-out fights with my mother, how he complained to her constantly about his own comforts and inconveniences while she was in hospice, and after her horrible lingering cancer death, how shameful he became, indulging in emotional abusiveness to a degree far beyond the excuse of grieving. Much of it was directed at me. And I suspect he hasn’t stopped being an asshole; though, we haven’t spoken in years. He found his true calling late in life.

My father, in short, was an emotionally stunted, highly manipulative, self-obsessed, cruel, dishonorable man, who liked to pretend otherwise—sometimes to himself, but always to non-family. He liked to lie. Still, I knew him and I’ve been on guard for most of my adult life because of it. I didn’t want to become like him. I worried that, because he was my father, I was somehow destined to devolve into an approximation of him in an Appointment in Samarra sense—that no matter how hard I ran in the other direction, I was just running headlong towards some kind of genetic destiny.

Like he said to me once about not wanting to be Catholic: I said, “I have a list of problems with Catholicism and, honestly, I don’t consider myself a Catholic at all. I’m not one.” He laughed at me and said, “You got baptized and were raised Catholic. There’s nothing you can do about it. You’ll always be a Catholic.” That made me angry. But that’s all he wanted.

He made a big noise about being Catholic my whole childhood. And then, when it suited him, he gleefully helped an unimpressive, desperate woman at the back end of unkind middle age into a state of abject adultery, which I believe is a grave, mortal sin according to the church. But whatever. It’s just one example of many. He didn’t actually take Catholicism seriously all those years. Acting righteous and upright just fit his brand.

But this isn’t really about my father. It’s about the myth that we become our parents, usually in the most disagreeable ways. There’s supposed to be a moment of clarity, perhaps sometime in our late 30s, where we pause and declare, horrified, that I’ve become my mother! Cute, but no, you haven’t unless you made a conscious effort to make her same bad choices. Even then, you wouldn’t really be her in any meaningful way. You will never escape yourself.

Certainly, character is influenced by upbringing. But such influence can only be one developmental consideration among many. You are you. Celebrate that. You are an individual, and neither facile social constructivism nor the ancient mythology of blood can take your individuality away. Those are nice ideas to play with. Maybe they make good stories or seeds of stories. But you are not without unique agency. When you look in the mirror, one person looks back, not your ancestors, not your parents, not your extended family. Just you. And you are more than the sum of those parts. Of course, that perspective implies a certain degree of responsibility on your part.

People love to flirt with powerlessness. It’s freeing to feel like you can’t make a mistake (because you can’t make a real decision when everything about you is already fixed). You’re a known quantity. You’re traveling on rails. So relax. You don’t have to change. Growth is a myth. Ethics? Don’t make me laugh. Self-initiation into a better way of life? Don’t kid yourself. Just make the same lousy choices you’ve always made because that’s what your parents and maybe grandparents did. It’s fate, baby!

This train of thought gets applied to the good things, too. But it’s just as ill-conceived. Maybe grandma was a saint (unlikely, but let’s say). How’s that working out for you today? If you consider yourself something of a genetic reincarnation of her, you might feel very superior to your fellow dirt ape. But if you still happen to be standing in front of the mirror, you may want to ask your reflection what happened. Isn’t grandma a direct ancestor in your bloodline? Between us, your halo’s missing and your pumpkin bread leaves something to be desired.

Was Uncle Bob a pedophile? Are you having tendencies? No? Did Aunt Phoebe run a dance company for the blind for 30 years all by herself? Nice! Then why is it that you can barely hold down a crummy office job and you’re afraid of your manager? Aunt Phoebe and 100 blind soldiers of the Nutcracker shake their heads at you from ballerina Valhalla.

These old myths seem like rationalizations for economic injustices at best, for path dependencies in coercive cultures, for systemic brutality, for the angst of staying where you are, staying who you are, maintaining the microcosmic and macrocismic status quo, and never risking change.

If things “run in the blood,” what use are you if you discover your ancestors were awful? You’re good as a slave, maybe. You’re good as a consumer, as an addict, as a drinker and a fiend. Just like dad.

Feudalism, for all its romance, is actually fucking brutal—on the mind, on the self-conception, as well as on the body, on generation after generation. And in many ways, feudalism is alive and well today in the myths of the old world that we’ve unthinkingly inherited.

In the 1980s, we learned about the zaibatsu system, which seemed a whole lot more Tokugawa than Datsun. In the 1990s, we had the rise of multinational tech conglomerates, which we don’t have to say much about along these lines, since they’re now up in our orifices 24/7.

Those were the easy feudalisms. But there’s a deeper, more spiritual vassalage at work: call it feudalism of the soul. And it says the liege lord is there by virtue of divine right. You are here by the providence of that same organizing principle. And if your life is nasty, brutish, and short, well, it’s just who you are.

But it really isn’t. You still get to choose.